Sturgeon

We need a better CAS plane than the A-10. There, I said it.

goddammit, now I have to go clean up my pants

Fucking John Conway, mate.

Anybody else having Mk3 cargo bays just fail to hold together on the pad?

Speaking of that clade of people, I finished Kratman's short on sentient robot tanks. It was certainly colorful, but I'm not sure what point he was trying to make.

I admit to having a soft-spot for the L/70-something high velocity cannons. They exist in this uncomfortable region before the proliferation of HEAT rounds and sabots, and that creates some hilariously specialized guns. But still, I like them.

Question: How are bypass ratios measured?

I just did a study for a small saboted rifle cartridge. I reason that cup-type sabots can be made reasonable small, light, and accurate for a weapon of this type (SLAP rounds are in service, after all), and that the gains for micro-caliber rounds would be enormous. Not only would swept volume be drastically improved (reducing the necessary length of barrel, as well as shortening the cartridge substantially), but larger-caliber rifling could be made tighter, accommodating generously long projectiles with high ballistic coefficients. An .18" caliber projectile could be made of about 35 grains weight that had about the same BC as the projectile for the 5.45x39, with leadless construction. To fire this projectile from a .28" cal sabot to a velocity comparable to the 5.45x39 would require a case only 26mm long, and a cartridge of almost identical OAL to the 5.7x28, if the .30 Carbine's case base is used. If the carbine-as-submachine-gun-PDW theory is to be implemented, this configuration or something similar would seem to be a low-ambition solution to the problem of designing effective micro-caliber rounds. I don't expect you could quite squeeze the accuracy from it that you're getting with rounds like M855A1 or Mk. 318, but it would be broadly comparable to M855 and 7N6. For 200/400m combat, that makes lots of sense. Oh, and because I am fucking tired of having to explain this all the time to people (not anyone on this site), I've decided just now to create a shorthand for weapon range requirements. It's two numbers separated by a slash. Both are ranges. The first is the primary design criterion range. So a round designed for 200m shooting has a whole gaggle of requirements (lethality, penetration, etc) that it must meet, but it may also be designed around certain requirements for more distant ranges, for example retaining penetration with potentially lethal energy at 400m, as well. So I'm shorthanding this to "200/400m." One might have a sniper rifle cartridge designed primarily for 800m, but still designed with longer ranges in mind, so perhaps that would be an 800/1200m round. I'd say 9mm is a 25/150m round, or 5.7x28 is a 100/200m round, just to give you an idea. 5.56 is a 300m/600m round, one could say. You can get weirder with it, too. For example, I'd characterize the 6.5 Grendel with 123gr bullet loading as a 800/200m round. It has too steep a trajectory to really match 5.56 in the intermediate ranges, but retains velocity well enough to actually be really impressive at the longer distances in terms of energy retained and trajectory. It's not some hard-and-fast metric, it's just a shorthand, mind you.

Military.com has an interesting - if a bit pop-y - segment on body armor. One failed project mentioned, the "creeper tank", I cannot find any other information on.

Swag? I dunno. I gotta give it to the guy, at least he's not carrying it at low ready like some of these OC yahoos.

I think if you're goung that small, you substantially do not want to be .22 cal anymore. If you think about it, all this discussion is exactly what was being thrown around in the late Fifties and the Sixties with SPIW. Each rifleman gets a grenade launcher, and is armed with a pissweak caliber that means his rifle is pretty much just a flat-shooting SMG with better penetration and lighter ammunition.

Shock cone/inlet design for hypersonic engines is fucking maddening, I don't think I'll ever get it. I would be interested to see, though, what sort of benefits you could gain by using modern materials in something like a J58. Maybe "better" has already been done before, I'm no expert on the subject.

Oh man, I would so be her senpai: If loving lolis is so wrong, why does it feel so right?

An SKS in an ATI stock. Classy.

Spaceplanes are certainly not dead in 1.0, just much harder to make:

We need more A-4 Skyhawk: If I had the choice to be given one aircraft of any in the world, with maintenance and fueling to be paid for by my unseen benefactor, I would choose a TA-4J:

Documentary on the A-7 Corsair II, from back when the Discovery Channel wasn't ass:

Huckleberry-Dog II:

This is hilarious in a way the WaPo surely did not intend.

In a further effort to reduce the nebulous quality of "cost", the latest Huckleberry model incorporates using the tailplane from an airliner as the wing advanced production methods: SPECIFICATIONS Mass (empty): 4.101 t Mass fuelled): 4.852 t Unit cost: K9,268 (turbo-ramjet variant), K7,848 (turbojet variant) Max speed (sea level): Mach 2.0 Max speed (altitude): Mach 2.5 Climb rate: 687 m/s Max altitude (engine flameout): 30 000 m Max altitude (apogee): 43 000 m

The bit about Easy Rider is interesting. I had assumed the redneck-hippie alliance lasted longer than that.

I've got it, thanks. I nominate The Terminator for this thread. Machines aren't anything like how they're portrayed in that movie!

I think it's probably the best multi-role fighter on the market right now.

I'm not sure I understand the category.

Welcome to the forum, Marsh!