Toxn

For a good idea as to why, go watch the house of wax remake. Spoiler: one of the protagonists finds a crossbow and shoots the serial killer to death. For another reason, bear in mind that prop guns are really fiddly and expensive compared to, say, a prop sword. Better to spend your pyro budget on squibs.

I'd take something rapier-y just because it's the only melee weapon I've had training with besides knives. Mostly, though, I'd just want to have more buddies than the other guys, and as much protection as I could comfortably run in. The element of surprise would also be way ahead of specific equipment wishes.

This is also why swords tended to be talked about a lot and preserved - they're expensive to make and take immense skill to make well. So they get to be status symbols even where they are not particularly more effective than other weapons (cue this argument again).

Well this is awkward...

SNERA?

Where do you live? In my neck of the woods (Gauteng) there has been a similar explosion of housing estates, malls and new developments of every sort. But this is because the province is hoovering in population from the rest of the country. Go to Mpumalanga and it's damn near empty.

Aren't the internal bays sort of piddly though? I mean, four 500lb bombs = bays full. Edit: http://aviationweek.com/awin/f-35-bay-presents-challenges-weapons Note the first comment, which points out (among other things) that for the little you gain in sticking your weapons into a stealthy bay, you might as well just hang longer-ranged standoff weapons on a standard airframe and win by saturation and standoff. There is then nothing stopping you from just leaving the strike aircraft parked outside of intercept range and lobbing ordinance in over the horizon until something sticks.

In 2000AD there is nothing outside of the megacities (food production is essentially a mystery nobody is interested in exploring) In the real world, everything outside of the megalopolii is either for recreation or resource production. It's mines, farms, water works and parks, with nary a human in sight.

Meh, the production values on that look one small notch above your typical flash video. Leave the eyeball removal for something less obviously built around a shoestring budget. Or, you know, this: https://youtu.be/i59__qZDR4k

You guys are just going through the same urbanisation pattern we (and other 'developing countries') are. The joke is that such a lopsided distribution (empty countryside and jam-packed megacities) is the most efficient way of distributing goods and services to a population. So the Western European model of more mixed distribution may just be an anachronism due to their weird demographic setup.

Define "preference". Plenty of organisms practice parasitism in one form or another, and laying eggs in some poor creature is certainly a form of parasitism. The problem for parasites is that they often become locked into one host, as the benefits of targeting a specific organism tend to drive the parasite towards specialisation. You can see this progression by comparing wasps which use this approach. The paper wasps (really broad term, but anyway) construct nests which are then used to house their developing larvae. The larvae, in turn, are fed chunks of prey by the adults. Having no real reason to specialise (meat is meat, after all), the paper wasps tend towards non-specificity when selecting prey. I've been stung so badly by these things The mud daubers and potter wasps go further: ranging from generalist snatchers through to specialists who target individual species. Their strategy for providing food to their larvae - creating a nest, laying an egg in it and then provisioning it with a paralyzed prey animal - obviously lends itself towards more specialisation by dint of having a particular volume of nest to fill and a correct ratio of paralyzing venom to dish out per prey animal. Meanwhile, the Ichneumonid wasps go all the way - by laying an egg in/on a living host and thus getting the food and shelter sorted in one go. As such there is a strong incentive to become specialised, as 'matching' the host's size and metabolic quirks will provide a massively improved chance for your offspring to make it. This has lead to the Ichneumonids becoming exquisite living guided missiles - in some cases to the point where they parasitize parasites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCo2uCLXvhk

Anything earlier than 1918 is kind of cheating as well

The South African equivalent was Troepie.

More hot rumours: I've heard via the grapevine that we recently (and surreptitiously) sold off all of our existing mirage III airframes (at least, all of the ones not in museums) to Pakistan, with the intension of using them as a sort of instant avionics upgrade package for the existing mirage fleet. As part of the sale, a number of South African aerospace folk were shipped over to provide conversion and certification services. The interesting part is that, as part of the process, the mirages have been set up for a one-way carry mission using Pakistani bombs, drop tanks and a one-shot inflight refuel - as the birds are otherwise too heavy to get off the ground fully fuelled. Once tanked up, the estimated range apparently tops out at just over 6000km - enough to hit pretty much anything in Europe or Asia. Apparently Pakistan is also where the last of the Argentinian mirages went - to be used as spares for the rest of the fleet.

This thread is for aeronautical failures of various stripes: flying machines that didn't work as intended or did, but were intended for something stupid. Note: no WWII German aircraft may be entered, as the thread would rapidly become about nothing else... Hurrr. First up, the classics: A reasonable design attached to a seriously flawed concept. This is a difficult one for me, because I have a raging hard-on for all things airship. Nonetheless; having a vehicle with a mean time between crashes close to that of a WWI biplane, but a cost and crew size closer to a navy vessel was not a good idea. Maybe now that weather radar is a thing? Sigh, why are all the things I love dumb?

Rumour has it that Denel has now landed a contract big enough to make it restart it's production line, and is currently frantically re-hiring all the folk who got dropped between 2007 and now. In the meantime, the company can enjoy it's sterling reputation for interesting paintball tournaments.

One of the known powers of the proletariat is time travel.

That or for the explicit purpose of making "he's screwed now" one liners. They look like they might actually be too long for spin stabilization to be a thing. Do you think Bubba thought far enough to ream out the barrel with his dremel when dreaming up this contraption?

What the hell did he do to those rounds?

This is like that part of the bible (Judges 1:19) where God's wrath is turned aside by iron chariots. Moral of the story - mankind is working up to pimp-slapping the cosmic powers.

The version I remember had the Romans doing the bending. In any case, one major advantage of working with iron is that it takes much less physical effort* to beat into shape than steel. Add in processing costs, ductility and the fact that the iron will take on enough carbon as a surface layer to hold a decent edge, and I can see why so many armies ended up using iron gear even when steel manufacture was known. *My impression from working with the stuff is that hot-forging steel takes about the same amount of effort as cold-forging iron. Finishing steel, especially without access to power tools, is also tedious in the extreme.

1>0

ALL HALE

Someone in product development must have had a long belly laugh.

Nitrile is a bit harder to put on than latex, so we tried to reserve it for people with allergies and dealing with EtBr (which goes through latex). Double-gloving ftw btw.