GMerlon

Some shamelessly stolen from a russian blog.
 

Couple more from the same site:

Some shamelessly stolen from a russian blog.
 

Some shamelessly stolen from a russian blog.
 

Japan's Self-Defense Force has selected a new rifle, the Howa 556. It won over the SCAR-L and H&K416.
http://www.jwing.net/news/19766

My appology for not proper camping but here's some photos from my hiking trips around Czechia (and a bit of Poland). Maybe an inspiration for someone. Czechia is probably the easiest country in the world for hiking. There is very dense, more than hundred years old, network of hiking paths which are well signed and also available on online maps. Since the country has pretty high population density you also can not hike too long without getting into some village or town and there are (nearly) no bears or wolfs to go after you. All in all no real advanture but a nice experience anyway. I do around 300 km of hiking per year depending on my free time and still have thousands left to do. All photos are from my phone, so the quality is corresponding. 
 
Here is just few of the photos. I don't want to flood this thread but if you are interested I can post a lot more or make a special thread. 
 
Sunrise on the Raná hill near Louny (some 60 km west of Prague)

 
View from Sedlo mountain, north-western Bohemia near German border

 
One of many ponds in southern Bohemia

 
Potštejn castle, eastern Bohemia

 
View from Srebrna Góra fortress towards the Czech border, Poland. What You can see is one of the forts of this absolutely massive fortress built by Frederick the Great after the war with Austria so that Laudon could never ever take Klodzko principality again. The fortress had around 220 guns and 4000 soldiers of the permanent crew and even Napolen didn't manage take it. Some say it's the biggest mountain fortress in Europe. 

 
 
 
 

Some guns met by bubba across the world.

Simonov is a very cheap carbine and many make Bubba out of it. 
 
 

...and some where you wonder what they were thinking...
 

A couple of unusual ones
 
Jetway 707

 
A 1965 Ford Econoline Pick-up
 

A clear masterpiece of elegant engineering...
 

The growing ranks of unemployed graduates worry China’s government
China Wants to Hit Back at Trump. Its Own Economy Stands in the Way. (I know New York Times)
 
Some older interesting articles:
 

@LoooSeR,  I linked them to their direct sources in my last post (they do show up for me). Here are they are uploaded independently on IMGUR though. Hopefully this will work for you!
 



 
I didn't mention this before, but apparently this Viking is more of a rental gun range toy

"rofl-stomping" doesn't fit in the usual list of goals in conflict. Iran's likely goal is to be the biggest pain in the arse possible, and they have the deck stacked in their favour:
 
21% of the worlds oil flows through that strait, and it'll take anywhere from a week to a month to clear the mines (a week for a narrow, sort-of-safe channel, but what insurer would accept a 10% chance they lose the ship?). That's without iranian forces interrupting the MCM, or targeting tankers in other regions near the iranian coast (ASM launchers won't last longer than their first salvo, but that's a lot of missiles in the air. You can't reliably get them before they fire either, as iraqi scuds proved - and scuds are larger than ASMs). For reference  the 1979 oil crisis only involved a 4% drop in oil production, and lead to a doubling of the price of oil.
 
The US options to respond are pretty short of a rofl-stomp - they can muster a small air & naval campaign at best with the forces available. The first gulf war involved thousands of aircraft (compare to the few squadrons moved to the region recently), and even with a ground campaign saddam wasn't replaced. They could sink most of the iranian naval assets, probably enforce air superiority over the important bits, pop most of the ASM launchers, and might as well strike the nuclear facilities, but what's the end-state? How do they get the iranians to stop fighting, short of a total occupation (something that would be several times larger than gulf war 2)? ASMs have shown up in the hands of non-state actors, so a bloodied state actor like iran could dangle the credible threat of ASM strikes on nearby shipping for the foreseeable future even with a constant US fast jet presence.
 
Autonomous mine countermeasures has the potential to greatly improve MCM speed, but it's not ready today in the numbers needed and doesn't solve the ASM issue.

https://www.kalashnikov.ru/ak-do-ak/
AK-46 N1

 

 
AK-46 N2

 
AK-46 N3

https://www.kalashnikov.ru/v-preddverii-yubileya/
Dement'ev's Avtomat. Variant 1.

 
V2

 
   Bulkin's avtomat number 1

 
Version 2

 
Korobov's

 
   Rukavishnikov's avtomat, number 1

 
Number 2

Um... ok

i had a little chat with the guys who developed this gun
he says as soon as you pull the stock the gun is ready to fire and its in fullauto with a 20 round mag 9x19mm and you can of course use bigger mags

 
p.s. TOKAT means slap in the face 
 
and a 7.62x39 mm version of MPT from Kale Group

Abrams Driver then Gunner* 
 
Anyway once after we returned from Kuwait and not to long after we gotten our tanks back from the boat/train we had to loan out some of ours to another unit conducting training. So after like a week of so the guys return the tank claiming the turret was traversing on its own with zero human input whatsoever. So one day the mechanics tell us to go ahead and startup this particular tank and move it forward (so the turret can be freely moved without hitting other parked tanks). They specifically told us not to worry about the turret because its hydraulic line had been completely disconnected and that there was no way it could move unless manually.
 
I hop in and startup and I swear that thing made the freakiest engine startup noises I'd ever heard. Sure enough a couple of moments later with my head out cause I was open hatch in the seat the freakin turret starts traversing on its own! Needless to say I immediately ducked my head and dropped the seat and did an emergency shut off of the engine. Even if I hadn't have ducked I would have been fine since it was parked with 2 tanks on either side and once the gun tube hit the adjacent tanks bore evacuator it stopped it in its tracks anyway. No one got hurt but the tank next to it had to get a replacement bore evacuator though lol......

Worked on a few bits of armor, some "semi famous".  Like the Littlefield M4A3E2 (Albeit briefly) and their "Swiss Hetzer".
Also did more than a little work on the M-18 Hellcat that appeared in that "The Void" movie that came out (and probably went direct to video) at the same time as "Fury".
 
An anecdote from it is from my first time working on it.
I was staff on a large MG shoot (Media/Photo/Technical(firearms)), and was trying to sleep on on a friday (the shoot starts noonish friday, we'd been there since thursday morning), and one of my friends asks "You said you were or are an aircraft mechanic, what do you know about Continental radials?".. (Now I'd heard that there was going to be a warbird or three showing up. So I semi lucidly said "hold on"  and threw on my coveralls and boots. Only to find myself diagnosing a no start condition on a M-18.
 
The gaggle there was about to pull the engine (The M-18 power plant can roll out on rails, but it's still a fucking shitshow, in the Arizona desert) when I showed up and said "Hold the fuck on, lets make sure it has spark, fuel, etc before fucking around with pulling engines".. Yes it had spark. Yes it had fuel, in one tank.. And you could hear the boost pump work.
 
SO I had a guy sit and listen at each fuel filler, as I blew into the line from the mechanical pump (the boosters are centrifugal). The guy at the full tank heard nothing. The guy at the empty tank "heard waves".  (he was like 12).
 
"Your fuel selector is not working"  I said.
 
But the switch works (It's on the firewall under the turret) I was told.
 
"No, the lever is working. (I hopped on the deck and looked down one of the air cooling grates and saw "Well, your linkage has popped off the selector. Hang on."
One  5/8" socket, innumerable bolts, lots of hanging inverted while my beer baby tried to smother me, and a bit of .040" safety wire later, and the boost pump was delivering fuel to the engine, and the beastie ran.
 
From then on (til 2015) I was the "defacto/default" driver and/or crew chief on that thing (and approved RKI and things big and tanky).

Rails, rails everywhere.

I've got some material you guys might be interested in from a guy called Jeff.
 
 
Partially 3d printed revolving pump action shotgun he's done some work on. While it looks good here it still needs a bit more work from him.
 
He's also done some really interesting work with home ECM drilling. I've got a link to an album of his short videos and pictures of his progress.
 
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPL_BjMquujSsvZ7GI4agkzNRans8eWeSYShzKFX5LzEi_dAU1oZk__nX-mUifCOA?key=ZkFVUWNKYW1XSGRMT2doMGdhYWRlXzVIQWM2Ty1n
 
This doesn't include the hobbyist work he's done on DIY nichrome electric primers or the ECM rifling he's successfully been able to do, if you guys are interested I'd be happy to try and post up that material for you, along with any other 3d printed gun tidbits that are relevant.

Kicking off; I've been on a dead tree media binge the last few months, as I've given up on kindle.
 
My current bedside table book list is:
The great leveller (Walter Scheidel) Utopia of Rules (David Graeber) Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (Peter Godfrey-Smith) Ring of steel (Alexander Watson) 1177 BC: the year civilization collapsed  (Eric H Cline) Oathbringer (Brandon Sanderson) War and peace and war - Peter Turchin Egg & Spoon (Gregory Maguire) Grace of Kings (Ken Liu) So far I've read up to Oathbringer (which is good, but has the typical issue of needing to have read all the books before it to get all the value out).
 
Edit: I'll post little reviews of the above more or less at random going forwards.