• 13 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • A well maintained and in-spec AR is phenomenal. Jim Bob’s AR he bought on sale from BCA is going to be a piece of shit. (I had one of their bolts dissolve on me once.)

    The tricky bit is getting one that is actually in-spec. The original blueprints are good, but the way they are laid out gives manufacturers too much wiggle room and can be a bit more difficult to read. This leads to a slew of problems when you have people jamming together random bits from different sources.

    It’s a versatile weapon and I like them when properly engineered and properly maintained. It absolutely isn’t the end-all-be-all and it’s embarrassing to see it in the hands of idiots who just want to make a political statement.


  • Did you compute for air in the barrel after calling out there was no air in space? Just curious about that, s’all.

    With that, there would be a hell of a suction on the bullet after the cartridge was fired. Also, the detonation doesn’t happen all in one go and continues as the bullet moves to the muzzle. (I did quite a bit of experimenting with that to reduce muzzle flash, actually.) So, the bullet is accelerating until the pressure is released when the bullet passes the muzzle.

    While air in the barrel isn’t really a factor on earth, surrounding air pressure absolutely is. It affects burn rate most but how it affects burn rate is a characteristic of the powder itself. (In zero-G, I would speculate a slower burn because the powder would be more prone to floating if it wasn’t a compressed load.)

    When I plan to go to lower altitudes, I typically use lighter loads or I risk over-pressure conditions. (I’ll basically just compute for a couple hundred pounds less pressure chamber.)

    After all that, I have no fucking clue what would happen in space because the conditions are so wonky.




  • It’s one of the better bad designs, in some cases. Something, something self-regulating air flow. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, I suppose.

    If there was any intelligence involved in our design, it was similar to a kid buying aftermarket parts for his car on eBay that then strapped them to one or two bits of ultra high grade equipment. The end result is something like a nice Supra that drives around town making weird farting noises.





  • I just ignored all the ads and any news, so you are likely correct. I did think that most of the games were mobile, but I must have been mistaken in thinking it was playable on Netflix clients on your TV or something.

    I used to play Pac-Man on my old FireTV with the controller while I was killing time in the mornings before work, so I thought it was similar in that regard.


  • Over the last few years, I have been thinking a ton about this style of article. They are riddled with phrases like “this shouldn’t be possible”, “breaks the laws of physics”, “it’s an impossible structure”, or something along those lines.

    While these phrases are partially click-bait and partially awe inspiring, I am starting to think that the approach we are taking for estimating the massive scale of things in the universe may be extremely flawed.

    I don’t claim to be a physicist or anything like that and am just your average internet idiot. However, it seems to me that working these problems in reverse might help. Our existing observations of the universe just seem to always put artificial caps on some problems, s’all.

    So, let’s take the most massive black hole we know of and then multiply it’s mass by say, a few million times. Immediately, there will be a barrage of people who would post a million (probably legitimate) counter points as to why that wouldn’t even be possible to begin with.

    It seems that given enough time, we eventually find some “impossible” things.

    While it’s easy so get lost in constraints like the possible age of the universe, likely theories of early black hole formation, etc… It seems that Occam’s Razor might be getting lost somewhere. I mean, even with all of our existing data that says otherwise, there is that thing that was impossible. It’s right there! What would it take to form that thing even if the conditions seem absurd?




  • Unfortunately, all it will take is one of the Korean groups to be responsible for destroying another Korean group in Ukraine for any retaliation to make it’s way back to the homeland.

    Hell, the story doesn’t even need to be real for one of the Korean governments to start lobbing shells over their border.

    Honestly, I think this is the plan. It was super weird for NK to actually blow up roads on the border. With that, combined with the timing of them sending troops to Ukraine is even more sus. This probably has more to do with US elections, than anything else.


  • Well, I would say that some groups are more vulnerable than others. There are a multitude reasons for this and it depends on education level, religious standing, geolocation and plenty of other factors.

    It’s kind of an odd generalization to say that “the liberals don’t realize”. Certainly some don’t. All parties have their version of “Karen” or grandparents that post insane Facebook rants, after all.

    Some groups are far more vocal when repeating Kremlin propaganda verbatim, though. That could easily skew the perception of who is actually believing what.


  • Yes. I followed a group of Russian trolls around for a bit and they will systematically seed right wing social media with shit stories. It’ll start on far-right sources and if the story picks up steam, it’ll migrate to more mainstream sites, like twitter, where it’s usually repeated by right wing politicians.

    Fake news sites are built and referenced until a site with better standing quotes the articles and is listed as the original source.

    If you did deep enough, you can usually trace stories back to Kremlin run outlets as well. However, by the time you have done all the digging and research, the next new conspiracy is already topping the charts.

    Many of the mega-posters on .ml follow the same patterns, actually. You can guess their timezones by when they post and comment and their day job seems to be posting on social media between 9-5. In the case of Lemmy, it seems to be used as a jump-off point for actual fake news sites. (Fake news sites are rarely used as headlines and are more used as comment fodder during any arguments.)

    While I am picking on right wing and tankie stuff here, this applies to any opportunity to spread shit with a variety of agendas and no political views are immune.


  • Regardless of who provides the slingshots, someone has got to know how to use them.

    Still, even with foreign support, Ukraine has singlehandedly revolutionized drone warfare. That is awesome and extremely frightening at the same time. The Switchblade was neat, but it supposedly costs $52k. Ukraine is strapping RPGs to drones for what? About $1k?