Weapons Man

We’ve featured an MP.18-II before, which is a later iteration of this exact same gun, with a magazine well reconfigured for straight magazines. (It led in turn to the MP.28, the Lanchester, and the Sten, by fairly direct process of derivation). But this gun, the MP.18-I, is the granddaddy of them all, and it could be yours.

Excerpt from an earlier version of this chart. It embiggens with a click, but it’s just an excerpt.

Ladies and Gents, here’s a freebie for you if you act fast, thanks to author (and retired Colonel) Tom Davis. Special Forces A Teams is a carve-out from Tom’s longer autobiography, The Most Fun I Ever Had with My Clothes On: A March from Private to Colonel. It includes his memories of service as a junior officer on a Special Forces ODA in the United States and Europe (Tom’s Vietnam service was in conventional forces, IIRC).

Alan Turing is one of the most interesting and memorable characters in the cast of players that presented the wartime drama known as Bletchley Park. And last night, a movie about him won, or didn’t win, an Oscar (we had to endure the first half-hour of the telecast last night as a social obligation, and then happily came home and plunged into the workshop, where things happen in three real dimensions in metal, wood and plastics). We haven’t seen the movie any more than we watched the Oscar telecast, so we’ll reserve personal judgment on it, but we’ve read widely on Bletchley ever since the first revelations were published (which we seem to recall was The Ultra Secret by Higginbotham, circa 1974 or 75). We have read numerous accounts published since then in everything from in-house NSA and GCHQ publications to popular magazines. We have read two biographies of Turing, both of which slightly overstate his contribution to computer science and perhaps to codebreaking, but which also display his true complexity and challenge as a human being.

This is a more recent AR lower design, called the Alimanu Phobos. Here’s an image of it:

Global Warming my @$!#^!!

OK, we get that it’s winter in New England, and that means it snows some, but this is ridiculous. We’ve spent hours removing drifts that are, in places, 4 and 5 feet thick, from our roof. Lest it collapse.

That is very seldom required around here. In fact, this is the year we finally unboxed and assembled a snow rake we bought in 2012. Or maybe it was 2011. We haven’t had enough snow to use it since them.

Snow! We are damned sick of the damnable stuff.

At least the Germans at Stalingrad had the flimsy excuse that someone had ordered them to go there. At least the Russians were at home, so they were used to it.

We have dealt with this much snow in February before. But that was in Harstad, Norway, at 68º 48′ N.  We are at 43º 00′ N. Why, that’s even south of Stalingrad!

Lord Love a Duck.

This was recommended to us by a commenter months, maybe years ago. But we finally got around to watching it. And you should, too. It’s a serious attempt to tell a true story of the Civil War, a remarkable human interest story. The story is that of the Battle of Newmarket in Virginia in 1864, and one of the most unusual units to as ever turn the tide of the battle: the Corps of Cadets of the Virginia Military Institute . These were young men and boys from about age 15 to about age 21.

We’d like to know more about this, but this is an ingenious project — using an RC model and working controls with dummy hands to put the viewer in the pilot seat.

Couldn’t figure out how to embed the video so here’s the link:

http://www.chonday.com/Videos/rcpapfpov3

Kid who did this is as slick as owl droppings. Apparently this is a thing now in RC airplane world.

Quick, spot the soldiers (One is in ACU. Two more in Ghillie suit over MultiCam).

The Golan Heights saw the largest tank battles since WWII in the East.

Would you let this person reshape your body?

One of the licks on the initial PTR-32 was that it was picky about magazines. The manufacturer still says the Gen II performs “best” with certain mags, including the grey Bulgarian polymer mags, but it’s less finicky than its previous iteration.

Today, we have two links for you that will expand your knowledge of what the DOD and Aerospace world is doing with additive manufacturing.

So on this weeks W4, there’s an interesting ad for an interesting weapon: a Granatenwerfer 16. The Granatenwerfer 16 is an update of an earlier device (Granatenwerfer 15).  The example in the next photo is not the Sturm sales offer; this one was captured by the Australian 13th Battalion at Morcourt on 8 August 1918, during the sanguinary 1918 Somme offensive, it rests in the Australian War Memorial, and, it’s worth noting, the Sturm example is more complete and in better shape.

In Lake Worth, Florida, the media scared the crap out of the public with sensationalistic headlines.

Ban it now. For the children!

That’s been the message that ISIL forces around Kobani have received from the US Air Force’s 9th Bombardment squadron, which is bombing enemy targets before the Kurds, using a plan that seems designed to impose as much friction and Fog of War as possible between the fighters on the ground and the guys toggling off the JDAMs and SDBs.

Iron sights are obsolete. Britain saw this one, and acted on it, before the United States did. (So did Germany, even earlier; but then they backed off). The plain truth is that iron sights are obsolete, outdated, dead; they’re not just resting or pining for the fjords. They’ve shuffled off their mortal coil and joined the Choir Invisible.

Today’s Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week: Sturmgewehr.com, is a sales site. It’s a sales site that is, in our view, narrowcast to, well, the sort of folks that read this board.

Why you’d go sailing off Nantucket in a February storm is beyond us, and we grew up in New England, and in boats. (Hmmm. Maybe that;’s why we don’t do this stuff, and this father-and-sun Sumdood team did). Why the US Coast Guard goes out off Nantucket in February is less of a mystery — it’s their job. In this case, they saved two knuckleheads who were out in 25-foot seas in a 43-foot boat with no auxiliary power (well, they had a motor, but it failed) and, thanks to near-hurricane winds, no sails either.