It's Jules' gun, so the "say WHAT again" one. Vincent has a proper M1911A1 (although also with a nickel finish & pearl grips, so it looks very similar)

https://xcancel.com/JesseJenkins/status/1840773225070158215

critical support to the US in reducing carbon emissions by de-electrifying itself

gommunism no food? capitalism no power!

heading for the "American STALKER/Metro" timeline

Bingo! Rockdale County chemical fire: Biolab has a history of fires at facility

Apparently that's just the name of the company, which rather than having anything to do with biological research, is actually "the swimming pool and spa water care division of Lawrenceville, Georgia-based KIK Consumer Products" (which I guess explains the chlorine).

Now, why the hell would you name your swimming pool sanitation company "BioLab" is beyond me, like genuinely who thought that one up.

For the revolvers in general, it has to do with reliability and usage of specific ammunition to avoid overpenetration. While today we generally consider self-loading pistols to be sufficiently reliable, this wasn't necessarily the case in the 60s and 70s, especially with the aforementioned types of ammo. Additionally, pistols with large-capacity magazines were just starting to become a thing, so a 6-shot revolver didn't actually have that much less ammo compared to most other pistols of the time.

For the scoped version specifically, it had to do with sniping in urban conditions, where you don't necessarily need a very long effective range, but you do want your weapon to not have a long rifle barrel sticking out of a window, giving away your position.

Here's a video by Forgotten Weapons that goes into more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1zEUGck8NE

Silent Storm (and its expansion Sentinels, they're sold together as Silent Storm Gold Edition), an XCOM-style game set in WW2 (with some sci-fi elements, like dieselpunk mechs that show up later on), featuring awesome environmental destruction mechanics. It's got a lot of jank, but it's still really cool.

opening up a 3rd front in order to open up my 2nd front, in order to, uh... what was I doing again

Nope - the Colt LMG has neither water cooling nor a quick-change barrel mechanism. There was an earlier prototype which featured the barrel change part, but that didn't make it to the final iteration

France sent a bunch to Russia during WW1 (I'm not sure if they were military aid à la WW2's Lend-Lease, or were actually bought by the Russian government), and they were later inherited by the Soviets after the civil war.

Just a handguard, it doesn't really serve any mechanical purpose, just covers the barrel & gas tube. I'm not sure why they went with this design as opposed to a more typical M16 handguard (as was actually the case in earlier attempts to make an M16-based LMG)

On the Colt IAR, which is a further evolution of this concept, there's also a big chunky handguard, but there it actually goes over a heat-sink around to barrel (you can see a bit of it poking out after the end of the handguard in this picture)

The LMG doesn't have anything like that, so yeah, I don't know why they went with that design.

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/07/08/belt-fed-bullpup-lever-action-rifle-chambered-in-44-magnum/

apparently

While belt-fed machine guns and even their semi-auto counterparts are banned in the UK, this ammunition feeding system itself is not

this rifle is merely a manual repeater

Here in the UK, we can’t have semi-auto firearms BUT – we can load our guns with as much ammo as we can (no magazine restrictions!)

https://xcancel.com/ArmchairW/status/1839453350854853047

There's actually a critical lesson to draw from this and other Ukrainian fiascos, of which the Bakhmut saga and the Zaporozhie Hundred Days come to mind: Ukraine will have ended up losing this war in large part because it consistently tried to fight beyond its means.

The Ukrainians started this war with an enormous army, well in excess of what the Russians could and actually did commit to the fight in 2022. That huge force (the "First Army") was badly mauled in early 2022, but it was rejuvenated later that year by a combination of ruthless mobilization and massive aid from NATO. This convinced the Russian Stavka to transition to the defensive and consolidate their position in Ukraine, withdrawing troops from more exposed positions in east Kharkov and right-bank Kherson. Any serious assessment of the situation at that point would have been that the Russians had consolidated into a basically impregnable position that the AFU was incapable of breaching (lest we forget in the wake of Russia's totally unhindered withdrawal from the area, their attempts at reducing the Kherson bridgehead by force in mid-2022 were bloody disasters), and the correct course of action was to start digging in and negotiate a peace treaty in the meantime.

The Ukrainian leadership instead threw a disturbingly large portion of the "Second Army" into Prigozhin's meatgrinder in Bakhmut and then ordered not one but two large-scale counteroffensives into Zaporozhie and the Bakhmut flanks using the post-Bakhmut remains of the "Second Army" and their NATO-supplied "Third Army." Those failed with enormous losses, opening the way for Russia to transition back to the offensive in late 2023 and begin systematically rolling Ukraine out of the Donbass. The correct course of action at this point was, again, to find a tenable defensive line and start digging. Zelensky instead ordered a "Hail Mary" offensive in Kursk with the remnants of the "Third Army" and significant elements from a lightly-equipped "Fourth Army," hoping Russian border defenses were weak despite their having ample warning of Ukrainian designs on the border region (courtesy of several earlier, smaller raids) and plenty of time to prepare. It proceeded to fail with enormous losses - Ukrainian forces breached the border, began to exploit, and ran square into a Russian haymaker counter-punch that stopped them in their tracks. The Ukrainians then reinforced failure, sending massive reinforcements into a death pit in an attempt to keep a sliver of Russian soil under their flag as a middle finger to Putin.

And while this was happening the front in the Donbass started to collapse with Russian troops making large advances and seizing key terrain, in no small part because the AFU's resources had been systematically redirected to a tertiary operation far to the north. We've seen, again and again and again, that when the Ukrainians got resources and generated forces, rather than admitting they are the weaker power here and working to strengthen their positions and conciliate, they instead squandered them on hugely ambitious and equally doomed offensives. In 2023 these offensives were aimed at restoring their pre-2014 borders when Donetsk may as well have been on the Moon for them, while in 2024 their ambitions transitioned to the outright insanity of conquering southwest Russia despite the fact they'd been on the military back foot for the last year. These are the moves of a power setting objectives beyond its means to achieve, and they will probably end up dooming Ukraine as a sovereign state going forward.

HK did actually develop a prototype along those lines (I think it was using proprietary magazines though, not sure), but it didn't end up going anywhere

however, there are actually modern license-built rifles that implement the concept (this one without a stock for US law reasons)

https://xcancel.com/maphumanintent/status/1720933055307600231

Fun theoretical exercise I'm currently working on for the @fortisanalysis side of things:

US refineries (total) only store about 40 million gallons of military-grade jet fuel at any given time, or about 36,400 flight hours for an F/A-18E/F Super Hornet launched from an aircraft carrier. For 40 x -18's per carrier, this is about 910 flight hours. A carrier holds roughly 3 million gallons of fuel for its wing, about 68 flight hours per bird. Now consider that a notional mixed complement of 20 x F-35's and 20 X F-15EX's operating out of Kadena AFB would consume about 62,400 gallons per hour combined. Thus, just a single carrier wing and a single AFB wing's complement of fighters (80 combined) theoretically all operating at once would drink 106,400 gal/hr.

So...

The net stores of military jet fuel immediately available from US refiners above the global contingency supplies managed by the Defense Logistics Agency at any time represents about 375 net flight hours for one carrier and one air wing...less than 16 days of high intensity air operations by far fewer assets than the US would throw into an all-out theater conflict in the Pacific Rim. DLA Energy ended FY2022 with 1.68 billion gallons of on hand inventory of jet fuel to serve the entire DOD combined inventory of 14,000+ aviation assets - cargo, fighter, rotary wing, bombers, drones, tankers, and recon. Which begs the question: How fast would two theaters of conflict burn through all contingency supplies of fuel? And what does DOD do when the well runs dry?

Reminder that for the Gulf War's air campaign, the US had nearly 6 months to prepare, move assets into place, build up whole new infrastructure, etc., right next to Iraq without the Iraqis being able to do much to respond. Westerners love to call back on that campaign to justify their belief that the US/NATO could totally destroy any opponent in just a few weeks with their superior air forces, but completely ignore the logistical realities of actually doing so. And today, with the proliferation of long-range precision munitions, actually managing to build up the concentrations of forces and supplies necessary for large campaigns like this is substantially more difficult - we see this already in Ukraine, with Russian deep strikes doing significant damage, taking out ammunition depots and arms shipments, and wiping out various gatherings of Ukrainian troops and mercenaries.

If Iraq had the ballistic missiles that Yemen wields today, things could have gone very differently back then.

I assume a lot of these patents wouldn't actually hold up if challenged in court - but I guess you can file them anyway? I'm not familiar with patent law at all, but seeing as there's literally millions filed, I would assume there really isn't that much oversight done at the moment of filing... which seems like a great system to have: just let those with the resources to go through the filing process throw shit at the wall, and leave it to anyone brave enough to get dragged into long legal proceedings to challenge them if they're bullshit.

this (for European patents) says:

grant of patents does not guarantee validity, and revocation is not uncommon. In fact, a large number of patent litigations result in revocation of patents by national courts. Moreover, according to EPO statistics, 70% of opposed patents are revoked or limited during opposition proceedings

And this is for patents that are actually challenged - who knows how many there are for more obscure areas, just sitting around with no-one (wealthy enough) to challenge them? (and I would assume this is even worse for the US)

There were a bunch of projects during the Cold War seeking to improve hit probability (as analysis had shown that most rounds fired don't actually hit) - generally, the idea was to fire several projectiles with each shot, to increase the statistical chance of at least one hitting.

The TKB-059 is probably the simplest and most basic attempt, by just literally tripling the gun and firing 3 bullets at once, but this obviously had the disadvantage of a lot of extra bulkiness, weight and recoil - it was just an experiment, more of a proof-of-concept (or attempt at one, anyway) that wasn't really expected to go very far. The West also attempted something simple, but from a different angle - the ammunition itself, with duplex & triplex rounds, where you'd have several bullets stacked in the cartridge itself, but those didn't work out due to accuracy issues caused by the several bullets interfering with one another.

Most other attempts were based on firing several projectiles in very quick succession - for example, the Russian AN-94 (which is after the Cold War, but it's still building on this idea) had a special hyperburst mechanism that would fire at a rate of 1800 rounds-per-minute (while most regular rifles tend to be in the 600-800 RPM range)

I wonder if there's some kind of legal norm thing of "you can't have references to common swears in an official document!" , or if whoever was writing this just wasn't paying attention (although maybe it's some kind of deliberate accent thing, since there's also dere instead of there? I honestly have no idea where they were going with that particular dialogue, like why pick this specifically to illustrate the concept?)

would "comedy sketch about cancelled TV show host coming back but having to adhere to network guidelines because he's struggling financially and doesn't want to be cancelled again" be fine?

That's basically just a synopsis of the video, I guess. I don't know how to write those in a nice and compact manner. Maybe just "comedy sketch about cancelled TV host" would be enough?

I think it's based on the Type 81, which is sort of like an AK-SKS hybrid (AK-style bolt and receiver, SKS-style short-stroke gas-piston)