roguetechie

Argghhh what sucks really really bad is that M73 M219 & M85 machine gun development saga actually justified the killing of US Army Ordnance pretty thoroughly since the abortions that those 3 guns turned out to be was entirely the result of the original designer of the root gun refusing a job offer at one of the Arsenal's after selling the working and thoroughly debugged design to Army ordnance, he took an offer to work at colt instead,  and in a fit of irrational stupidity said arsenal hired TRW to "evaluate" (read evaluate as fix the fucker until it's irretrievably broken) the design they just purchased. The guy that was in charge of the redesign supposedly needed to fix all the "flaws" TRW "found" was pretty much known as a consummate douche canoe already and never once owned up to taking a production ready gun and turning it into irredeemable shit either!
 
The designer of the gun was Russell S. Robinson, and in the decade or so British ordnance or whatever messed with it but never managed to buy the very good gun that stayed a very good gun over something like a decade of playing with the gun ... You'd think they would have noticed all these serious flaws and safety issues TRW "found"!
 
 Robinson was understandably irritated by this turn of events, but GE was flat fucking pissed off since they wound up running the arsenal and having the now thoroughly fucked formerly working gun dropped in their laps after Army Ordnance got killed for one too many such incidents where bureaucrats who acted more like bitchy teenage girls actively sabotaged a design because their feelings were more important than defending the free world from dirty commies.
 
And the tool bag project manager, you guessed it! 
 
He told anyone and everyone who would listen that the gun worked great after his team fixed the fatally flawed design and GE chose not to keep him on when they wound up in charge of the arsenal, therefore GE must have changed something!
 
Yes folks, he is the original SHIT LORD in whose image all other lesser shit lords since him have failed to measure up to his standards of consummate and uncompromising cradle to the grave shit lording!
 
Dude has to be like 90 now, but I swear to God.... He's the one old man I'd beat like a red headed step child if I ever met him face to face!
 
Really really hate that guy...
 
For those wondering, I'm pretty sure that the gun in question was the Robinson model 33 but I can't find the damn PDF of both fighting firearms articles for some reason.
 
P.S: Australia, England, and JSSAP you guys suck too for, you know, not adopting any of the guns he developed for you guys...
 
Especially England and Australia
 
Here's why:
 
Australia aka the original sin...
So the Australian government put out this completely insane set of requirements for a new machine gun. It was a very long list but here's the really fun one's (from memory here and I'm not certain if the fire rate piece got tacked on later to their already "totally reasonable and easy to meet" list of initial requirements)
1. Must be in .50 caliber BMG
2. Must fit in aircraft wing and other gun stations which currently have .303 Browning anm2 guns installed.
3. Must not exceed the peak trunnion force generated by the .303 anm2 guns installed.
4. Must match the fire rate of .50 BMG aircraft machine guns (were the .50 BMG versions anm2 also or anm3?)
 
Completely sane and reasonable list... Which is why Robinson's design was the only one submitted & or the only one that even came close to meeting the requirements. And yes, over a remarkably short development period he met all 4 of the requirements above. (anyone who tells you his design was rejected because of low fire rate just assumed that GD was at least as competent & or with the 50 years of technological advancements couldn't possibly fail so miserably to even reach the bar Robinson set so long ago with XM307/XM312... They underestimated GD grievously) He actually achieved comparable fire rates to the browning aircraft specific .50's and apparently wound up with pretty comparable receiver life which statistically speaking was perfectly acceptable because the planes tended to be destroyed before the guns wore out.
 
Australia and if I recall right did the only logical thing when someone managed to actually meet the requirements... They didn't put the gun in production.
 
Onto England now!
 
We cannot let ourselves be outdone by a prison continent:
 
Robinson is now in England, the war is still ongoing. Robinson develops about the simplest possible ring mount that you can for a simplified ring mount competition (I believe this is pre D day, and people realize that a majority of, if not every truck they send over to supply the march towards Berlin needs a ring mount and some sort of machine gun.) Robinson designs a universal ring mount that will fit any machine gun a trucker can "liberate". Being an overachiever he designs a full auto only .50 BMG gun that feeds from top fed 20 round detachable box magazines.
 
Seeing their requirements met and exceeded even, England does the only sensible thing and doesn't buy the gun or the ring mount.
 
Then there's the model 11 machine pistol which Robinson figures out how to make a single hand friendly machine pistol which any idiot can kill the shit out of you with where even the magazine auto ejects once empty, and the Stock is essentially a piece of steel tube that screws into the bottom rear of the pistol grip. Seeing that someone somehow actually succeeded, whichever Commonwealth nation decides that the requirements were too easy and decides that it should function and have an accuracy in semiautomatic like a hi power... Robinson was from all evidence on his way to figuring it out, but something happened and no one produced this either. (It was the only sensible thing to do)
 
JSSAP epilogue: the model 11 nee 14 is now the model 16 idk wtf happened here but I'd sure love to find out. If anybody has anything about this of any sort please let me know.
 
The moral to this story: If you want to design machine guns that are really truly good, especially if they're lightweight...
 
Be born Russian

Bring on Snow Crash baby!
 
Life would be so much cooler if pizza guys were known as Deliberators and carried what's basically the equivalent of the noisy cricket from men in black to handle disputes and robbery attempts while clothed in fashionably designed shear thickening fluid impregnated ballistic, impact, and edge weaponry resistant armor under black leather while driving a purpose designed delivery vehicle that's part Bugatti veyron part the Lexus from minority report.
 
All whilst dodging traffic consisting mostly of hybrid minivans colloquially referred to as bimbo boxes, and trying to avoid car surfing skateboard couriers with purpose designed equipment the Army Rangers would be jealous of!
 
To include day and night capable hyperspectral imaging based night vision and a HUD display integrated into Sport sunglasses, skateboards with actively adaptive wheels that smooth out the ride over rough surfaces and allow gravity defying wall rides by virtue of gecko mode capable tweels on crack! As well as an antirape device involving high voltages and a Chinese finger trap like one way only preventers of unauthorized pussy grabbing! Oh and the coolest car surfing specific tool in the arsenal of the underage skateboard couriers.... THAT'S RIGHT!!! 
 
THE superconductive electromagnetic MAGNAPOON device which also integrates 10+ meters of ultrathin and strong cabling and an atlas ascender like powered reel... Perfect for all your car surfing needs, even allowing you to make the disposable and almost devoid of ferromagnetic alloys bimbo box your bitch!
 
I mean, wtf can be cooler than something called magnapoon that uses superconductive electromagnets ultra high strength cable and a powered cable reel? Especially if your skateboard has gecko mode active suspension wheels that allow you to ride up the side of Jersey Barriers and slingshot maneuver yourself between traffic on 8 lane highways doing in excess of 80 mph?
 
Oh that's right... The Yamaha tesseract cameo appearance years before the Yamaha tesseract's debut at an auto show and piloted by our intrepid protagonist... Hiro Protagonist!
 
What's truly impressive is that dominoes is well on it's way to fulfilling several separate things from the book.
 
1. They get their delivery drivers robbed semiregularly through stunningly bad corporate policies.
 
2. There's now an actual Dominoes specific delivery vehicle. Granted, it's more bimbo box than deliverator but it's a start!
 
3. Uber is kinda close to underage skateboard couriers with gear an Army ranger would kill to have... Especially since several delivery based illegal and stolen gun selling as well as delivery based drug dealing operations have been busted already.
 
Or, short answer...
 
Yes shit is getting very dystopian future cyberpunk lately.
 
PS: now all we need is a strung out on heroin dolphin hacker named Jones and a gang called the lo teks to start making the news and we're officially in "THE FUTURE"

Straight up nothing but wall to wall shit lord boomer trash... All I'm going to say about that comment section.

Straight up nothing but wall to wall shit lord boomer trash... All I'm going to say about that comment section.

Over at the National Interest, some numbskull wrote an article on the M103 Heavy tank and kept referring to author Robert Icks as "Robert Hicks."  It irritated me.

something like this
 

There are several methods you can do this with, including the one that you have shown above.
 
The method you are considering will leave several tabs that you have to remove by hand or by machine. You can make those tabs fairly small, too. It will leave you with hand finished spots on your part.
 
The second method is to take your work and drill the initial holes in it before you do any other machining. You can then take your work and bolt it down to a fixture plate, and machine the rest. This might require removing the vice from the mill table, and I don't know if people would frown upon that where you are. You might also be able to mount the fixture plate in the vice, it depends on the equipment. Also, you are then expecting those two screws to take all the side load from machining.
 
The third option is to use a work piece thick enough to clamp in the vice and still have enough material sitting proud of the jaws to machine your part. You can machine the entire part in the first set up, and then make a set of soft jaws that will contour the part for when you flip it over and face the back down to the correct thickness. The downside is that you waste more material, and it takes more time, but you will have machined every surface to exactly what you want.
 
All of these methods are fairly common practices in machine shops, and there are definitely several more that I am missing.
 
Additionally, you could get most of the checking done with a .45 pointed chamfer tool. It wouldn't cleanly terminate at your boundaries, but it would be close.

Bele's like brought be back to this jewel. The thing I like most about this passive-only radar fighter is that it's "designed" to be survivable in one scenario (two fighters trying to track each other)... Which a fighter with a proper radar can also do by, you know, putting its radar into passive only mode.
 
But does having a passive only radar give you any advantages? Hmmm, let me think. No. It makes you a snack for things that have radars that you can't intercept, like AWACS and ground radars and R-33s and shit.

I can almost see passive radar on a big stealth boat capable of communicating with AWACS or a radar drone or something. But a small maneuver fighter with no stealth and no radar? That's the worst of all worlds right there.

I've been warning Tony of this failure mode for years. He never listened to me (although I was probably too late to begin with).
 
It's funny that recently he tried to trot out the bogeyman that my proposals would result in failure modes similar to his GPC... So what he's saying is that I'm right, and you need to push for proposals that are as light as possible because otherwise the powers that be will overdo it? I never understood why I was supposed to be so terrified of that "revelation". Anyway, I guess he still thinks of me as being on one side of the fence or the other.

Russian military satellite blew up the largest ammunition warehouse in the Ukraine with space lasers
 

SH_MM, you will probably like this - a patent for Zaslon APS.
http://btvt.narod.ru/raznoe/zaslon.pdf
 
Video with tests:

Chaborz - Chechen republic - produced light ATV/buggy for SF units

Chechen-made Chaborz M3 used during training
 

I have every confidence that if the entire country were mobilized to fight a global war, with the entire populace conscripted to either fight in the war machine or produce weapons for it, and with the unlimited resources and credit of the federal government at hand, the production of a Gen 5 fighter could be shortened from two decades to about a year or so.
I'm sure the budget hawks  at NRO who are bitching and whining about having to pay for new highways, airports and power plants would be delighted at that sort of mobilization of federal power.
Edit: Although NRO is the same bunch of pointy-headed think tank remoras who were pissed that Trump wants to bring back domestic manufacturing capability to the US.

Jesus Sturgeon,
I just read the article... I want my 6 minutes back.
And then you get to the 14 comments and realize that the majority of Americans, whether pro or anti F35, are dangerously close to functionally illiterate!
Sweet baby Jesus!
That's the real headline here!

I got dibs on page 863...
Bofors master race

He's saving it up for page 455

@Conner Webb
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the sight in question is for a grenade launcher.

Conner,
The Yugo guns are a weird mix of a bunch of elements as Tito preferred it from what I understand!
Using the rifle grenade launchers as an example, they're actually the NATO standard (22mm diameter right guys) rifle grenade interface. 
That is why my handful of Israeli pattern practice grenades and my nearly ww2 vintage strap a pineapple grenade to a tail fin kit work.
Additionally there's some divergent dimensions here and there in Yugo AK's that I've "heard" show at least some Chinese type 56 lineage rather than straight Warsaw pact pattern. 
I have a splitting headache so please forgive me for any egregious mistakes in this post.
On the note of Yugo AK's and Zastava in particular, have you seen the switch barrel switch caliber bulged trunnion guns Zastava built for their Grendel experiments?
Very very simple barrel change, and to my eye it looks like the key parts of the system prone to wearing out from repeated installation/removal are simple cheap robust and easily replaceable!
 
In my world this is extremely exciting, and a little vexing because of just how ****ing easy making a switch bbl Ak turned out to be!!!
Real WTF? Why didn't I think of this moment!

ROFLMFAO
I made a comment on above top secret the other day calling one out for being just that...
I also dropped the truth bomb of stealth not being a binary thing. The whole idea that it just works or doesn't work with no middle ground COMPLETELY ignores everything written about stealth by people who know about stealth in the public arena since at least the late 90's!
I'm sure several of you are thinking why the f*** do you post on ATS?
tradition mostly... It was my home base on the internet since early 2001, and the site I was on that shitty day in September while doing inbound tech support and sales for McAfee. (Weird fucking day, weird couple of months before that! 15 years later and I'm still very conflicted, angsty, and disturbed by stuff that happened that day and the few months before and after)
 
Plus the wehraboo hunting there is like going to texas to hunt feral pigs.

It is indeed a rifle grenade sight.
Not safe to use unless you have the gas cutoff hardware too though!
Just because it has one in no way means it has the other.
I use mine to launch DIY dummies and occasionally bust out the old adapter set that lets you launch army pineapples.

Are images like this of interest over here? I don't think big scans of these drawings are out on the net. These are all from the final Sherman powertrain. 




 
 
 
 

Most Western MBTs have a mix of mechanical and hydraulic systems in their transmissions.  The transmissions are a series of planetary gears plus a hydrodynamic torque converter.  The steering drive is usually, but not always, a hydrostatic, infinitely variable motor that connects to the transmission output by a series of mechanical differentials.  There are also usually hydrodynamic retarders that supplement the brakes, like when the tank is going downhill.  The torque converters usually compromise the tank's ability to engine brake.
Pure hydraulic transmissions have been tried once or twice, but I don't think they were terribly convincing.