Virdea

Everyone else has a Garand - imagine how many women will come running to your side when you pull this bad boy out and line up a few grenades.

+1 on the Ariska Bolt, its only weakness is front locking lugs.

I have just figured out we are getting this all wrong.  The 6.8mm and others are part of a move for General Purpose bullets.  How many will we have to buy to make that market happy?  50-60 rifles at most, and probably no MGs..  By definition everyone at the rank of Colonel or lower will not get one of these weapons.  

Just some video clips of the MAS 1936 in action.

Wait, so all those grand tank charges was so that Monty could maintain some kind of imaginary "ground taken versus men lost" statistic?

 

Also I am glad I am not the only one who noticed how Squad Leader has a Wehraboo bias.

My theory is that Monty was not a complete dolt that he is made out to be.  His letters and diaries show he was VERY worried about being forced into throwing lives away.  Throwing tanks away though he was less worried about.  So he expended tanks to show Churchill he was on the ball.

Squad Leader was a brilliant game, but lots of games find they have to put the finger on the German side.

It is not an elegant weapon, but it is the simplest bolt action weapon ever made.  Just for an example, 

I challenge you to find a simpler bolt design.  Compare it to the Mauser:

And if you figured one in five soldiers break a firing pin when first learning to take the bolt apart, and another one in five will loose their mainsprings.  Or the Winchester:

Firing pin spring retainer is a real biddy to loose when you are cleaning the thing in the field.  And of course the Lee-Enfield whose rear locking lugs is so like the MAS (good for keeping mud out of the bore):

Lots of small parts.

This makes sense.  Sometimes I just want to see the patterns.  My bayonet book is an example of my deep seated desire for connections.

My answer is before your comment, but the answer was a distrust of safeties.  Early mechanical safeties were unreliable.  The theory was that it was impossible to accidentally discharge a weapon that was never loaded.

The French safety is installed on each soldiers trigger finger.  

The reality is French rifles did not have safeties until 1945 when they were installed on the MAS 1944.  French theory - originating in the 1860s, was that a safety was just a mechanical device which could be set to the wrong setting or could mechanically fail when you needed it.  French soldiers instead maintained strict weapon discipline.  

Soldiers carried a weapon with a loaded magazine and no round up the spigot.  You only jacked a round in when you were ready to fire, and when the battle was over you went back to no ammo.

Bayonet deployed.

My MAS 36/51 with grenade launching site deployed.  Also with the sight removed from the weapon.  The launcher has two set points, a 45 degree indirect and a direct set point.

My memorial day gun.  Off I go this afternoon with my 36/51 and 10 rifle grenades.  

Removed for dbl post.

Europe, Romans, and the Caliphate all had issues with iron in there turns.  

In the Caliphate in 985 you have the first chemists coming close to answering why iron mined in one area was superior to others.  Several iron processes from the Caliphate would be developed with local success such as adding various types of wood, puddling, raking, and multiple furnace heating, to get iron ready for end processing.  A sword made in the Caliphate that reached Europe could be worth 25 or 30 mouton d' or whereas a sword from Sheffield would be worth far less, at least in the 13th century.  

Paris in the 13th century had to replace execution swords every 2-3 executions because of breakage, and policy required the executioner to have at least five spare swords.  They were forced to use swords made in Nevers or the Cote d' Ventoux, where they were cheaper but the process was inferior.  

the Romans used the same sword makers from the 1st century BCE to almost the 14th century CE.

Didn't the ROKA really start turning around when Korea itself started going from a hideous despotic hellhole to a functional modern state?

ROKA demonstrated in Vietnam that it had turned around, at least in some divisions.  15 years was the horizon for that event.  Ability for 1/2 of 1 generation.

The average bad guy moves 1 meters in the first second after they decide to enter kill someone, 2 meters in the second second, and 4 meters in the third.  There after they move at least 8-14 meters per second.

It takes a police officer 2 seconds to engage an enemy from status 3.

7 meters is your effective envelope.  If an advancing bad guy enters your 7-meter envelope EVEN unarmed, and ignores warnings to halt, then an investigator will draw a 7 meter circle around you.  Engage an unarmed man at 8-meters and you are a murderer.  Engage an advancing unarmed man at 7-meters or less and you are likely in your right.

FBI records say optimum engagement distance is 3-5 meters for handguns.  1-2 meters is point blank and not optimal. So the idea engagement point in a 3-second advance is second 2.

The 7 meter rule is a must for people in the business.

There's plenty of ways to make sure they get appropriate punishment without deciding that because we're the good guys we can do the sort of thing that would make anybody else immediately stop being the good guys, and I'm glad someone else agrees.

 

Once you get permissive and euphemistic about torture and the like, you guarantee things will happen.

The fact is soldiers in combat (or police on the road or what have you) will once in a while loose sight of where the line is drawn.  The answer though is not to draw a new line and hope that one holds.  I am in favor of prisoner advocates with one power - to audit all interrogations and yell "stop."  Properly arranged they look to the rights of the POW without gumming up the system the way a lawyer would.  

And I always hear: "would you torture someone if there was a nuclear bomb ticking down in your own town"?  And I think come one, that happens like never.  Making up a 1-1million what if to prove the 999999 is weak.

To be fair, when you realize that defense companies from other major powers such as the USA and Russia/Former USSR don't exactly have the cleanest track records on arms trafficking or selling to ....."reputable" clients (god help you if the CIA ever gets involved/gets caught helping), it sort of makes sense that they too want their own slice of the market now that they have the industrial base and influence to do so. Sometimes it just involves some rather underhanded or shady practices to compete and accomplish as they've learned.

 

As for how they operate on some of their darker clients, I'm sure I could dig up some details, but not exactly a full rundown for rather...obvious reasons.

I am mostly interested from the point of view of trying to make sense of things.  I always assume that arms running has to make sense from a money perspective, or from a political perspective.  Some of what I collated makes no sense - no one benefited and no one made any money.  Hardly seems in character.

Polytechnologies Ltd and Norinco have had a rocky road with the Chinese government in recent years.  For the past 20 years 40 employees of these two companies have been indicted in China alone for arms smuggling.  In some ways I am baffled by the economic sense this smuggling makes.  They found entire cases of automatic capable rifles in Alemao in Brazil and the drug dealers can't have all that much money to line Norinco pockets.  And I cannot even find a benefit from the point of view of advancing Chinese interests.

If someone can ever find out how gun running for Norinco works I would love to know it.

ISIS POWs will (and should) have all of the rights of a prisoner under the various conventions.  Faced with barbarism the protectors of civilization cannot give up the high ground - the US never should have played loose with the WoT.

That said it is relatively easy to hold tribunals to assure that most of ISIS actors get some sort of punishment.  

Oddly enough, was looking for articles online and Timothy Yan did a piece on it, he actually does allege that the weapons weren't the original weapons from the Syrian government's arsenal, but infact on a shipment intended for the Syrian Free Army on a deal brokered by Qatar. However, the plot thickens as he speculates the funding came, from, well. somewhere not surprising but somewhere it really shouldn't have come from.

 

 

http://www.thebangswitch.com/the-chinese-m99-50-caliber-anti-material-rifle/

 

So, If true, we have yet another case of "The CIA doing something really stupid and having it backfire horribly on them." Though, don't take it as truth because, while I said "somewhat" credible, Yan has been wrong on a few things before, so take it with a grain of salt for now.

My own research says at least three fishy ships entered Syrian waters and entered ports NOT controlled by the Syrian government.  Sa Ja Bong was the most suspicious because it was suppose to be by tracker in Chinese port when it was photographed in Syria.  The main issue I have been hearing from French friends is that the CIA has been really late to this game - only the UK and France have moved heavily into the arms business into the area.  

The other rumor is that Turkey is paying BIG protection money to ISIS now, in the multi-million Euro range, and has been transferring military hardware.  Turkey had a long standing connection with AQI and its operators were caught on several occasions meeting with the Isis predecessor organization.  There is a possible movement of Chinese arms, brokered by North Korea, and delivered via Turkey to Isis.  

Finally, there is an American connection through private weapons purchased supposedly for Hezb being routed (or captured, hard to tell) to Isis.

ARVN just had so many failure points...  But. But.. Ugh

I can't decide which rode the failtrain harder.  And that is sad...

The Korean Army was considered horrible in the 1950s - then turned around and is now one of the tigers of Asia.  The ARVN did very well from 1971 to 1975 - fighting a very hard war without much support - abandoned by its allies.  If S. Vietnam had survived they would have become another tiger.

Iraq is weaker because of its origination as an Ottoman kludge state, but has potential.

I have multiple students who work for me, but I would send a student who wanted a model of diversity away first to tell me what they think the model is.  Peter Reinsch presented a model in the early 2000s that gained my attention when he was studying immigration patterns in Europe.  The economics diversity model has traditionally been fairly flawed because people are more than money, but when you throw religion, psychographic attitudes on religion, sex, marriage, work, and wealth, empathy ratings, and the like into the model then you can measure diversity very well.  

"Is differentiation to the point of using other as a verb in a very awkward sounding construction essential to one or both of those processes"

I have no idea.  My training in anthropology is limited to the essentials

"and how would one go about measuring that sort of identity thing?"

This is a dissertation level discussion.  My own training is psychographics and human studies and I can think of dozens of ways to develop diversity measures.  

What can be done about diversity?  Nothing.  Diversity has other advantages.  There is a lot of truth in the idea that you can have a diverse society, a free society, or an orderly society, but not all three.  The low point in American crime figures is 1955, when significant efforts were made to eliminate diversity.