roguetechie

Steam generators seem like an awesome idea until you figure out how much it's gonna cost to make the little fuckers...
 
Well, and realize just how frightening the idea of leaving untrained survivalist types unsupervised around pressure vessels is. Especially when you just know they're gonna use this shit to power their meth labs.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The irony of this entire event is breathtaking.
 
Also, the response from the gun channel owners from being demonetized and kicked off of Youtube: "This sucks, but we'll make it work. We can get through this and find a way."
 
The response from a lefty getting demonetized: "Fuck them I'm gonna shoot you all."
 
Next time someone tries to get condescending about the gun control debate, treat gun owners like "petulant children" and just want "to have a civil, open, honest discourse", remember that they are projecting like a damned IMAX.

At the end of January, 2018 and after many false starts, the Russian military formally announced the limited adoption of the AEK-971 and AEK-973 rifles.  These rifles feature an unusual counterbalanced breech mechanism which is intended to improve handling, especially during full auto fire.  While exotic outside of Russia, these counter-balanced rifles are not at all new.  In fact, the 2018 adoption of the AEK-971 represents the first success of a rifle concept that has been around for a some time.

Earliest Origins


Animated diagram of the AK-107/108
 
Balanced action recoil systems (BARS) work by accelerating a mass in the opposite direction of the bolt carrier.  The countermass is of similar mass to the bolt carrier and synchronized to move in the opposite direction by a rack and pinion.  This cancels out some, but not all of the impulses associated with self-loading actions.  But more on that later.

Long before Soviet small arms engineers began experimenting with BARS, a number of production weapons featured synchronized masses moving in opposite directions.  Generally speaking, any stabilization that these actions provided was an incidental benefit.  Rather, these designs were either attempts to get around patents, or very early developments in the history of autoloading weapons when the design best practices had not been standardized yet.  These designs featured a forward-moving gas trap that, of necessity, needed its motion converted into rearward motion by either a lever or rack and pinion.
 

The French St. Etienne Machine Gun
 

The Danish Bang rifle
 
At around the same time, inventors started toying with the idea of using synchronized counter-masses deliberately to cancel out recoil impulses.  The earliest patent for such a design comes from 1908 from obscure firearms designer Ludwig Mertens:


 
More information on these early developments is in this article on the matter by Max Popenker.
 
Soviet designers began investigating the BARS concept in earnest in the early 1970s.  This is worth noting; these early BARS rifles were actually trialed against the AK-74.
 

The AL-7 rifle, a BARS rifle from the early 1970s
 
The Soviet military chose the more mechanically orthodox AK-74 as a stopgap measure in order to get a small-caliber, high-velocity rifle to the front lines as quickly as possible.  Of course, the thing about stopgap weapons is that they always end up hanging around longer than intended, and forty four years later Russian troops are still equipped with the AK-74.

A small number of submachine gun prototypes with a BARS-like system were trialed, but not mass-produced.  The gas operated action of a rifle can be balanced with a fairly small synchronizer rack and pinion, but the blowback action of a submachine gun requires a fairly large and massive synchronizer gear or lever.  This is because in a gas operated rifle a second gas piston can be attached to the countermass, thereby unloading the synchronizer gear.

There are three BARS designs of note from Russia:

AK-107/AK-108
 


The AK-107 and AK-108 are BARS rifles in 5.45x39mm and 5.56x45mm respectively.  These rifles are products of the Kalashnikov design bureau and Izmash factory, now Kalashnikov Concern.  Internally they are very similar to an AK, only with the countermass and synchronizer unit situated above the bolt carrier group.


 

Close up of synchronizer and dual return spring assemblies

This is configuration is almost identical to the AL-7 design of the early 1970s.  Like the more conventional AK-100 series, the AK-107/AK-108 were offered for export during the late 1990s and early 2000s, but they failed to attract any customers.  The furniture is very similar to the AK-100 series, and indeed the only obvious external difference is the long tube protruding from the gas block and bridging the gap to the front sight.
 
The AK-107 has re-emerged recently as the Saiga 107, a rifle clearly intended for competitive shooting events like 3-gun.
 

 
AEK-971

The rival Kovrov design bureau was only slightly behind the Kalashnikov design bureau in exploring the BARS concept.  Their earliest prototype featuring the system, the SA-006 (also transliterated as CA-006) also dates from the early 1970s.



Chief designer Sergey Koksharov refined this design into the AEK-971.  The chief refinement of his design over the first-generation balanced action prototypes from the early 1970s is that the countermass sits inside the bolt carrier, rather than being stacked on top of it.  This is a more compact installation of the mechanism, but otherwise accomplishes the same thing.


 

Moving parts group of the AEK-971

The early AEK-971 had a triangular metal buttstock and a Kalashnikov-style safety lever on the right side of the rifle.



In this guise the rifle competed unsuccessfully with Nikonov's AN-94 design in the Abakan competition.  Considering that a relative handful of AN-94s were ever produced, this was perhaps not a terrible loss for the Kovrov design bureau.

After the end of the Soviet Union, the AEK-971 design was picked up by the Degtyarev factory, itself a division of the state-owned Rostec.



The Degtyarev factory would unsuccessfully try to make sales of the weapon for the next twenty four years.  In the meantime, they made some small refinements to the rifle.  The Kalashnikov-style safety lever was deleted and replaced with a thumb safety on the left side of the receiver.


 
Later on the Degtyarev factory caught HK fever, and a very HK-esque sliding metal stock was added in addition to a very HK-esque rear sight.  The thumb safety lever was also made ambidextrous.  The handguard was changed a few times.



Still, reception to the rifle was lukewarm.  The 2018 announcement that the rifle would be procured in limited numbers alongside more conventional AK rifles is not exactly a coup.  The numbers bought are likely to be very low.  A 5.56mm AEK-972 and 7.62x39mm AEK-973 also exist.  The newest version of the rifle has been referred to as A-545.

AKB and AKB-1


AKB-1


AKB


AKB, closeup of the receiver

The AKB and AKB-1 are a pair of painfully obscure designs designed by Viktor Kalashnikov, Mikhail Kalashnikov's son.  The later AKB-1 is the more conservative of the two, while the AKB is quite wild.

Both rifles use a more or less conventional AK type bolt carrier, but the AKB uses the barrel as the countermass.  That's right; the entire barrel shoots forward while the bolt carrier moves back!  This unusual arrangement also allowed for an extremely high cyclic rate of fire; 2000RPM.  Later on a burst limiter and rate of fire limiter were added.  The rifle would fire at the full 2000 RPM for two round bursts, but a mere 1000 RPM for full auto.

The AKB-1 was a far more conventional design, but it still had a BARS.  In this design the countermass was nested inside the main bolt carrier, similar to the AEK-971.

Not a great deal of information is available about these rifles, but @Hrachya H wrote an article on them which can be read here.
 
 

Thank you for taking the time to explain this.  Technical discussions across a language barrier are often difficult, because technical terminology rarely translates well!

It sounds like the fire control system on the Leclerc works very similarly to other, modern MBTs.  In English technical jargon it would be described as having a feed-forwards, two-plane, gun-follows-sight stabilization system, but it sounds like the literal translation of the French terminology would give an English speaker a very misleading idea of what's going on.

Well it's just a certain nuance.
Obviously there is a stabilisation system but it is limited to the stabilisation of the line of sight (within the sights).
The turret itself has no stabilisation system.
A stabilisation system uses a set of gyroscopes located at specific points (hull, turret, armament).
The angular informations gathered by the different gyros is computed by the FCS which gives a set of corrections to the elevation and traverse mechanism (the most early stab systems where the armament remains to the same position no mater how the tank behaves). In addition the FCS adds on top of this another set of corrections related to the ideal LOF (later stab systems that introduces the concept of correction of the position of the tank).

On the Leclerc, the sight being how it is, the number of variables is kept as minimum as possible. You only compute the angular variation between the current LOS and the ideal LOF. The set of values is then dispatched to the "guidance system" (asservissements) which monitors the actual movement of the turret (traverse and elevation) and assess the need to power the electric motors or revert them into generators to brake the movement.
In itself the tank knows on its own the position of the differents elements (hull, turret and armament) with the closed loop elevation and traverse. The sight give the angle of the whole.

Hope it is clear. It's not a whole lot but we make this distinction.

Ok, so the phrase may have been in use with white supremacist organizations for a while, but I still don't get how the phrase "It's OK to be white." is inherently racist or discriminatory. Everyone reacts to that phrase as if it were on the same level as "gas the jews", though.
 
I guess I must be a racist.

Right... People are not happy.
 
Really really unhappy, and honestly the key cornerstone to everything Democratic party right now is a demented and malicious peer pressure that the fucking Stasi would weep tears of pride seeing...
 
Only problem is in November when people go to vote they can drive their Prius with all the right bumper stickers to the polls, wait their turn to vote, shut the curtain as it's their turn up to bat, sigh and vote against the Democratic party which has went completely off the rails to the point where they have to FEAR losing jobs income opportunities friendships and even personal safety for stepping even a little out of line...
 
And then pretend to be Really shocked at the water cooler the next morning and completely perplexed at what could have possibly went wrong!
 
All the while mentally adding goo gone to their shopping lists and debating just how many weeks they should wait to put their Prius up for sale and just how soon exactly they can use the goo gone to scrape off the stupid fucking bumper stickers without looking like a defector... "No Bill, i did my part in November and I'm pissed too but Nancy wants us to spend more time outdoors so I gotta get rid of the Prius for something more capable and you've read consumer reports man! I can't afford to lose 20% on resale by leaving the stickers on!!!"

Yeah, if Nancy does what she says she's going to do and push tax cut repeal as part of the 2018 agenda, and they keep using kids to attack human rights, yeah, people will turn out in droves.  

I don't know if you're seeing it.  In 2018 there are three ledgers, Democrat, Republican, and the Big League Party.  Big League Party and Republican share a column on the ballot, but that's camouflage.
 
The people that voted for Trump in 2016 are stoked as fuck right now.  The mainstream media polling doesn't reflect that, just as their analytics failed to reflect the greater-than-expected support for Trump in 2016.  This isn't like the Bush Administration at all; back then you could reasonably judge what Republicans were thinking by what was being broadcast on CNN, and come to some sort of informed projection on midterms.  Not no more.  You could probably tell what Republicans are thinking today by listening to CNN.  What you cannot predict is what Big League Party people are thinking by listening to CNN.
 
Big League Party voters might as well be made of dark matter.  They inhabit the same physical universe as you or I, but they seemingly don't interact.  They have completely independent and parallel sources of news media at this point.  People bitching about Fox News being right-wing agitprop?  They're fucking fifteen years behind the curve.  They might as well bitch about Dawson's Creek ending and David Beckham changing his hairstyle to that weird quasi-mullet thing.  There is now a fairly sizable field of populist-oriented right wing news media, almost entirely de-centralized and distributed via the internet.  For your average Big League Party voter Fox News isn't right wing enough.  But they like Tucker Carlson.  He's cool by them.
 
If you want to figure out what Big League Party people are feeling right now, you have to journey to the dark matter universe where they live.  You have to read Breitbart, you have to read populist Twitter, /pol/, r/Thedonald, stuff like that.
 
If the Republicans loose seats, but the Big League Party gains seats, the dark matter entities will be cackling with glee.  The Republicans are allies of convenience to them, and unreliable ones at that.  They could face significant setbacks on paper and still be in a much stronger position than they were in 2016.  If this happens, I guarantee you that the mainstream media will misinterpret it.
 
Even so, I'm not seeing this Blue Tide in 2018.  Politics isn't just about energy, it's about organizing that energy.  Effective movements are never spontaneous; they always have people massaging the public face of the movement, they always have allies in the legislature, they always have ways of getting money from donors to where it can provide effective pressure.  Until recently, the Democrats had all of those things.  The Democratic machine imploded and, remarkably, it remains imploded.
 
 

Probably because this administration isn't silencing people with death threats? 
 
I much prefer this administration to one who's whistleblowers end up killing themselves with two bullets to the back of the head, or perhaps who get mugged and stabbed to death in the streets but still have their wallets on them.

Walter, I have a question for you... Seriously honestly here...
 
Do you really think you guys are the only people who are pissed?
 
Do you really think the gun control bullshit on the backs of people who aren't even old enough to vote and very blatantly being coached prodded and etc by people who ought to know fucking better hasn't set some white hot fires burning?
 
Your side has so grievously and egregiously over played the piss weak fucking pathetic hand you had so badly that a large portion of the country has JUST STOPPED TALKING!
 
It's not that we don't have anything to say, fucking believe that!
 
It's that a level of burning animosity has been stoked which is just shy of people saying fuck the ballot box altogether.
 
P.S. how'd them pollsters do last time Walt? 
 
Fuckin terrible? You don't say!?
 
You're correct in saying that your party has done nothing but sow the seeds of animosity, where you're incorrect is in thinking you're going to reap anything from it but the whirlwind.

It's not a myth so much as a misunderstanding of something that actually does happen and is misattributed to be caused by lacquer residue.
 
If you go out and fire off a few mags of steel case and then switch to brass cased ammo without cleaning the chamber you will often start getting failures etc.
 
The reason is that the steel case lets a little fouling back into the chamber wall area but the steel and lacquer combo is slippery enough to slide over it while the friction generated on the brass cased ammo from the fouling is sufficient to create failures in some cases..
 
It's not caused by lacquer residue though, just plain old material science.

ERA which quits while it's three drinks in?

The craziest hotel/seagull/pepperoni related story that I've read in some time.
 
http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/lifetime-ban-from-victorias-fairmont-empress-for-pepperoni-seagull-fiasco-lifted-after-17-years
 
 
A Nova Scotia man has received a “pardon” from the Fairmont Empress for his lifetime ban from the iconic Victoria hotel after he inadvertently trashed one of their rooms with a pack of pepperoni and a flock of seagulls.
 
It all happened 17 years ago when Nick Burchill booked a room at the Empress for a work conference. Burchill was also in the Canadian Naval Reserve and his Navy buddies asked that he bring some Brother’s pepperoni, a Halifax delicacy.
 
“Because this was the Navy we were talking about, I brought enough for a ship,” Burchill wrote in a March 28 Facebook post about the ordeal, which has gone viral.
 
His pepperoni-packed suitcase was misplaced by the airline, so it arrived in Victoria a day late.
 
Burchill knew the pepperoni was likely still edible but he thought the most food-safe thing to do would be to keep it cool until he turned over the goods.
His fourth-floor room facing the Inner Harbour was large but lacking a refrigerator.
 
“It was April, the air was chilly. An easy way to keep all of this food cool would be just to keep it next to an open window,” Burchill wrote.
 
He spread the packages of pepperoni out on a table and along the window sill, then went for a leisurely four- or five-hour walk.
 
“I remember walking down the long hall and opening the door to my room to find an entire flock of seagulls in my room,” Burchill wrote. “I didn’t have time to count, but there must have been 40 of them and they had been in my room, eating pepperoni for a long time.”
 
Burchill discovered that spicy pepperoni does not agree with a seagull’s digestive system. The room was covered in guano. Burchill’s unexpected entry startled the birds.
 
“They immediately started flying around and crashing into things as they desperately tried to leave the room through the small opening by which they had entered,” he wrote. “Less composed seagulls are attempting to leave through the other closed windows. The result was a tornado of seagull excrement, feathers, pepperoni chunks and fairly large birds whipping around the room.”
 
Lamps tumbled to the floor, the curtains were trashed, the coffee tray was disgusting, he described. Burchill waded through the flock and opened the remaining windows to let the gulls escape.
 
“One tried to re-enter the room to grab another piece of pepperoni and in my agitated state, I took off one of my shoes and threw it at him,” he said.
Burchill then chased the last gull standing through the room as it held a “big hunk of pepperoni in its gob.”
 
He grabbed a towel, captured the bird and in his haste, threw the package out the window, too. Unbeknownst to Burchill, the shoe and the towel-trapped seagull had plummeted to the Empress’s front lawn, striking a group of tourists who were walking toward the tea room. Back in the room, Burchill was surveying the damage and also trying to make it on time to an important work dinner. Then he realized one half of his only pair of shoes was on the hotel’s front lawn. He recovered the shoe which was a bit wet from landing in a patch of soil.
 
Burchill tried to dry the shoe with a hairdryer, and when his phone rang, distraction caused the hairdryer to plunge into a sink filled with water.
“I don’t know how much of the hotel’s power I knocked-out, but at that point I decided I needed help,” Burchill wrote.
 
Finally, he called the front desk to fess up to what happened.
 
“I can still remember the look on the lady’s face when she opened the door,” he said.
 
He left the dismayed cleaning lady and went to his work dinner. When Burchill returned, his items were moved to a smaller room and eventually his company received a letter banning him from the Empress.
 
In his mea culpa letter to the hotel, Burchill writes “I have matured and I admit responsibility for my actions. I come to you, hat-in-hand to apologize for the damage I had indirectly come to cause and to ask you reconsider my lifetime ban from the property. I hope that you will see fit to either grant me a pardon, or consider my 18 year away from the empress as ‘time served,’ “
 
Tracey Drake, the hotel’s director of public relations said as wild as it sounds, the story is true. Drake initially thought it was an April Fool’s joke but long-term staff confirmed the tale, she said.
 
“It’s one of those things where you can’t make this stuff up,” Drake said. “In the hotel industry, you see a lot of things.”
 
Burchill visited Victoria and the Empress Hotel over the Easter weekend. Ryan Reardon, the hotel’s director of rooms, told him he is once again welcome as a guest.
 
“I bet it was the pound of Brothers Pepperoni that I gave them as a peace offering that did the trick,” Burchill quipped.

So #NeverTrump Kevin "All Working Class Americans Should Just DIE Already" Williamson was fired by The Atlantic for holding the belief that all women who get an abortion should be hanged and for refusing to recant said belief after being given numerous attempts to do so by the magazine's editorial board.
 
http://thehill.com/homenews/media/381823-the-atlantic-fires-conservative-writer-after-audio-reveals-he-called-for-death
 
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kevin-williamson-fired-atlantic_us_5ac66563e4b09d0a1191532b
 
This warms the cold, cold cockles of my heart considering what a miserable human being Williamson is, and how he actually worked to get Hillary Clinton elected in order to punish us Deplorables for not supporting his guy in the GOP primary.

Put it this way man...
 
They literally put up educational posters in pubs explaining to people that if you beat the dog piss out of the paramedics when they show up, your injured friend they came for might bleed out on the fucking pavement.
 
Something else to consider: Boy doesn't this sure put the lie to the entire practice of comparing crime statistics from one country to another?
 
Quite literally a bar parking lot altercation that will land you in prison for 1-10 years here 75% of the time if you get prosecuted, will result in charges being filled better than 90% of the time if law enforcement is called, and is better than 95% probable to be called in to law enforcement in America... Is just fuckin Tuesday at a MIDDLE CLASS English neighborhood drinking establishment!
 
No one will call the cops so you have no chance of even having charges filed.
 
The reality is our country is far less violent, if you choose to be violent you're far more likely to incur criminal charges for doing so, our conviction percentages are probably a bit lower for those prosecuted but nowhere near low enough to make up for the vast disparities in the first two stages, and finally if convicted here you will do far more time and suffer far greater lifelong effects wrt income housing employment etc.
 
We prosecute far more people, fuck them way harder if we convict them, and continue fucking them for the rest of their lives even once the official punitive fucking has been completed... Of course we're less violent!
 
 

...You want everyone to be disarmed so that you can get beaten with fists by drunken soccer fans?

From my perspective - and the perspective of many other Americans - effective weapons like knives and especially guns are protection against "tossers", and de-escalate situations where bad men do bad things. The only way they wouldn't be is if good people aren't willing to take their defense into their own hands. I can certainly understand how, in societies where good people are expected to stand by while men in hats handle things, guns and knives would be frowned upon. After all, good people don't do own them, so if you do then you're a bad person and no good person on Earth wants to arm bad people. And since only the men in hats and those with their explicit approval are allowed to do anything, any consensus has to be codified into law, or else how is it enforced? QED, they outlaw weapons, and grunt in satisfaction afterwards. But fists are fine, of course. 
 
But I don't think that way, and I don't want to live anywhere where everyone else thinks that way, either. That sounds like a bad country for good men and a good country for bad men. No, I want to live in the country where people can kill others. And I do live there. It's great.
 
 
Losing faith in your government after having surrendered all your authority in weapons must put you in a bit of a tight spot.
 
 
My innocent British friends must be patient with me, because frankly, I deeply enjoy the turning of the tables here. I've been told my country is awful and wrong and horrific and how ashamed I should be by folks with funny teeth and funny accents my whole life. Payback.

Any bike with that much tupperware hiding the greasy bits, cannot be worth much.

You are insane (technical definition) if you think accusing Democrats of creating the ‘Russia thing’ as an excuse for losing the election is saying he fired Comey for his handling of the Russia investigation.
 
Furthermore ‘handling of the Russia investigation’ is backpedaling from ‘obstruction of justice’.

I'll give you the summary, and it will shock no one: Lobbyists and special interest groups have a greater effect on the legislative process than the general population, and have for a long time. In other news, a thug was shot in Chicago today.
 
 

Haven't watched it, but I can tell by the title that it's a piece of self-righteous propaganda by someone who identifies with a group (e.g., the Democratic Party, or a European country) that is even more corrupt than what they are criticizing.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/boingboing.net/2018/03/22/craigslist-personals-shut-down.html/amp
 
Oh... We're not just fucked... We're turbo fucked, and the people at the top are either in on it or they couldn't possibly have been smart or ruthless enough to crawl over enough bodies to be one of the fucking people on top.
 
I'd like to thank my ex for being the incorrigible cock hound she is for once in that she spotted this shit pretty much in real time LOL.