Monthly Archives: February 2019

New Life for an Old Police Magnum

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When we last looked at my old 870, it had been through a ringer, and I changed a few things. I got a cool magpul stock and a magazine tube extension. Class notes gave me a few more things I wanted to change.

First: the sights, which entailed a new barrel with (bonus) fresh parkerizing. Basically, I wanted some sort of rear sight. I found myself dissatisfied with a bead (and no sight rib for the bead to sit on). I settled on a barrel set up for rifle sights that came from the factory with XS Express-style rifle sights. Perfect! These sights were originally designed for quick acquisition at close ranges while threatened by dangerous game on the African Savannah, and I can’t think of something more appropriate to what I want this shotgun to do. Plus, being barrel-mounted, they require exactly no gunsmithing of the receiver. Now I have a rear reference to avoid making elevation errors at range.

I could have gone with ghost ring sights, but those end up needing gunsmithing (to drill and tap the receiver), and I didn’t feel like doing that. A red dot would also have been a good choice, but that would have cost much more, and I didn’t feel like spending the money here. It would also probably have needed a gunsmithing trip.

Sights sorted, I next wanted to deal with the problem of illumination. I’m a firm believer of defensive weapons needing a light to identify targets. There are a bunch of ways to do this, and I settled on the most turnkey: the Surefire DSF-870 forend. It replaces the factory forend, and has a light and controls for said light built right in. Controls include momentary and constant on buttons, as well as a lockout switch so your batteries don’t run down in the safe. This solution isn’t the lightest or the cheapest, but it stands up to recoil pretty well and tends not to smash hands up.

So that’s that. And my shotgun is more or less done, aside from a likely future trip for some cerakote to refinish the receiver. Let’s take a brief moment to talk about something that isn’t on the gun: ammo saddles. There’s no cuff on the stock for ammo either.

For my purpose, I question the need for ammo on the gun. I’m not a law enforcement officer. I currently have a capacity of 6+1 shells. I really can’t see myself needing more than that in a defensive encounter. Shotgun shells are pretty good at making people stop doing whatever it is that they’re doing. Given that, plus the size of recorded home defensive encounters, plus the complete lack of relevant1 encounters where people run the shotgun dry has led me to skip the bother, cost, and weight of playing around with sidesaddles.

  1. For law-abiding civilians who are non-LEO. ↩

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Feb. 27, 2019)

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This is the 20th Edition of Wednesday What We’re Reading. It’s been a fun feature so far, and well-received to boot, so with a little luck, the next time I make mention of anniversaries in the introduction is when we’ve been doing them for a year.

Defense

History, Photos, Paintings

Science and Technology

Other

  • On wage stagnation – Slate Star Codex is tops on my list of blogs whose authors I would disagree with on nearly every matter of substance, because the guy who writes it is so sharp. Also, the commentariat there is in the same club as ours—good ones.

San Antonio-class BMD Ship

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Ballistic Missile Defense is tricky. It requires lots of radar power and plenty of missiles. Right now, you can use your Aegis-equipped ships like the Arleigh Burke-class for the job. But those weren’t designed for the role, and the current state of the art SPY-6 radar is as big as you can fit on one. That is still not ideal for BMD work. Could we do better? Could we make a big air/missile defense ship, preferably on an existing, proven hull? Huntingon-Ingalls has some thoughts on the matter. They currently make the excellent San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock, and think it would be a great candidate for conversion. Let’s look at their proposal.

The San Antonio-class is a large, modern ship for amphibious operations. They are 684 feet long, 105 feet wide, and displace 25,300 tons. They have a large helipad aft for operating MV-22s and have a well deck to launch and recover landing craft or amphibious vehicles like the LCAC. They’re currently in production too. At present, armament is limited to two RIM-116 launchers and two 30mm cannons. They also have provision for a 16-cell Mk 41 suite, but are not fitted with those at present.

HII’s proposed conversion ditches the well deck and and sports a redesigned superstructure capable of mounting four 25’x35′ (WxH) S-Band AESA arrays for better search and discrimination of ballistic missile targets. Four X-Band Arrays would be fitted above the S-Band arrays for tracking and fire control. The large hull of the San Antonios allows the BMD variant to carry no fewer than 288 Mk. 41 launch tubes.

The large hull of the San Antonios allows for plenty of extra power generation and cooling equipment, so that won’t be a problem. The large hull also allows for a higher radar mount without compromising stability. One currently noteworthy limitation is that the San Antonio-class LPDs are only capable of about 22 knots. For the role it’s designed for, that’s not a huge limitation, but they’d slow a task force down if included in one. And the number of tubes would make them tempting to include in a task force.

Finally, let’s talk cost. To the good is that the San Antonio-class production line is hot. An existing hull is no small savings. On the down side, a fancy Aegis-type suite plus big radar that isn’t going to be cheap, and I know of no appropriately-sized radar offhand that would do the job. Radar development isn’t cheap. Overall, I’d say it’s a good idea if you’re really dedicated to BMD, but without actual price numbers, I can’t really give it a great thumbs up/thumbs down. My gut is that it’s a bit too expensive for what it is, given current budget priorities.

Fishbreath Picks: AAF Week 3

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My picks in parentheses. NoExtraPoints is now my go-to source for box scores.

Arizona at Salt Lake (Arizona-4)

Salt Lake is better than their record indicates, I suspect, but they fell 38-22 to Arizona in week 1. Team quality in the AAF has so far been more important than home-away as far as picks go, and Arizona is currently the AAF’s best passing team.

Memphis at Orlando (Orlando-14.5)

Memphis has played execrable football so far this year, as Christian Hackenberg reminds us that not every NFL washout is a diamond in the rough who just needs a bit more development. Taking a 14.5-point favorite in a league where teams rarely score more than 25 points is maybe a bit risky, but Orlando’s averaging almost 40 points per game and Memphis is averaging 9.

Birmingham at Atlanta (Birmingham-6)

Atlanta has an accurate quarterback but a bad offensive line, and Birmingham has been good at pressuring quarterbacks. We know from Week 1 that the Iron can move the ball and score on bad teams, so I’m going with them here.

San Antonio at San Diego (San Antonio+2)

San Antonio won the week 1 meeting by 9 points, prompting a mid-game QB switch. Philip Nelson, who took the helm for the Fleet (see what I did there?), is not a dramatic improvement over whoever they had in week 1, and I expect San Antonio to, at the least, keep it close.

Fishbreath Watches: Alliance of American Football Review

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If you’re a regular here at all, you’ll recall that I’ve been watching and enjoying the AAF, the current player in the spring football scrub league space.

The thing is, spring football scrub leagues have rather a fraught history. There was the XFL1. The less said about that, the better. The USFL puttered along for three seasons in the 1980s, then tried to go toe to toe with the NFL and immediately folded. There are a bunch of minor leagues listed on Wikipedia, none of which I’ve ever heard of.

There were are2 arena football leagues. The Arena Football League is down to six teams, but still trying its very best, while the American Arena League (est. 2017) is actually expanding to Pittsburgh3. There are other leagues, too, according to Wikipedia, which comes as something of a surprise. Arena football has some novelty, at least, with its smaller teams, smaller field, high scoring, and backyard-style rules (you can motion toward the line of scrimmage, and the nets are in play!).

Arena football lives, yes, but nobody has ever built a successful, enduring spring football league playing with substantially NFL-like rules. There’s one obvious reason: you’re competing with other, more meaningful sports. Hockey season is starting to get interesting, baseball fans wait on the edge of their seats for spring training news, basketball both pro and college is in full swing. Fans don’t have unlimited attention. You need buy-in, and you need a good product.

Does the AAF have it?

Buy-In

So far, there’s a surprising amount of buzz around the AAF. The games aren’t heavily attended by NFL standards, but they do seem to be drawing reasonable crowds—north of 10,000 in just about every game so far, and more than 20,000 in some instances like San Diego where the local football fans have been robbed or starved of their live football fix.

I’m talking about it, for another, as are the local sports radio personalities and a few of my football-related follows on Twitter and Youtube.

The Rules Changes

Now we get into the question of product quality. At least on this front, parvusimperator and I agree: the AAF’s changes are brilliant.

First: no TV timeouts. They do some product placement and fit in ads during natural stoppages in play, but they never outright stop the game for the purpose of advertising.

Second: fewer natural stoppages in play. Primarily, they’ve eliminated kickoffs. You start at your own 25, or you can elect to try a 4th-and-12 play from your 28.

Third: no extra points. You always go for two points, the effect of which is likely to reduce the number of ties in regulation and therefore of overtime. One of the AAF’s goals is to have games over and done in 2.5 hours. So far, they’re hitting that mark.

Fourth: simpler overtime. Each team gets one possession each, first and goal from the 10. No field goals. After each team gets a crack at it, the score stands.

Finally: the Sky Judge, a referee who watches from the press box and corrects bad calls.

The On-Field Product

The rules don’t matter if the football is crap.

So far, it hasn’t exactly been uniformly good, but it hasn’t been crap either. For every San Diego Fleet quarterback situation (two different starters through two games, combining for a less-than-50% completion rate) there’s an Orlando or Arizona, whose offenses seem to be firing on all cylinders and generating high scores and good football action.

It’s a little early to say if it’ll stay middling or trend one way or the other, but it’s a decent start for what it is, ultimately: an NFL minor league.

The Viewing Experience

One thing the AAF is doing right is streaming their games. During Week 1, you got the CBS commentary teams. Not so during week 2—instead, the stream was a commentary-free, graphics-free skycam, typically showing plays from the Madden-esque behind-the-QB perspective. Situation and score information comes from the web page surrounding the stream. You can decide for yourself if that’s good or bad.

Obviously, I haven’t been to a game in person, given that I am in Pittsburgh, where it is cold, and the AAF is largely located in the south, where it is warm. (Or warmer, at least.) Ticket prices are pretty reasonable. If you want a season pass to the club level, with (at least in some stadiums) all-inclusive food and drink, that’ll run you $800 or so a seat. If you don’t mind sitting at the top of the stadium (or the top of the lower bowl, for larger stadiums), you can find season tickets as cheap as $75, which (like some Browns games a year or two ago) is less than you might pay, per game, to get into a high-end high school game.

Concession prices seem to vary. They’re expensive in San Diego, because they’re playing in the Chargers’ old digs and don’t have full control over prices. I can’t find anyone talking about prices one way or another for the other teams.

The Intangibles

The team names feel a little strange right now, but I suspect that’s familiarity as much as anything. ‘Orlando Apollos’ may not be very poetic, but then, I come from a town with Steelers and Penguins, neither of which is much of an exemplar of the beauty of English.

Already, the league’s financials seem shaky—they needed an emergency infusion of cash to the tune of $250 million, which is half again as much as they’ve raised to date. $750 million in total is a big initial investment to recoup. For comparison, in 2015, the Packers’ total revenue was $376 million, between their share of the league pool and their own tickets, merchandising, and concessions income, of which $40 million was profit. If the AAF as a whole is as big as the Packers, which I doubt, that’s a lot of years before they make their money back.

Which is why it seems the AAF is going all in on gambling. They’re already part owned by some casino or another, and there’s been talk of next-play betting and daily fantasy built in to the AAF’s mobile apps. I understand that move, but I’m not entirely comfortable with it for reasons I can’t quite articulate.

Maybe it’s because the league, teams, and future gambling operations are all one organization. Look at last Sunday’s San Diego Fleet game. They were up 21-12 with 30 seconds to go in the game, and were 9.5-point favorites. They kicked a field goal. If I were a gambling man and I had money on an NFL game with that outcome, I would grouse, but not seriously. It’s a little more suspicious when my bookie also employs the players and coaches.

That’s awfully conspiracy-minded of me, isn’t it? Let me be clear: I don’t honestly believe that the AAF will get into the game-fixing business when they can already print money with above-board gambling. In the final reckoning, I like the AAF so far. Will it have staying power? Only time will tell. The football is half decent, though, and for the fan who’s already itching for the NFL preseason, it’s good Sunday afternoon comfort food.

  1. Apparently, they’re trying again, launching in 2020. I’ll believe it when I see it. ↩
  2. News to me! ↩
  3. They play at the massive 1200-seat RMU Island Sports Complex Dome. ↩

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Feb. 20, 2019)

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“Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under socialism, the reverse is true.” – A Twitter Wag

“It’s been a really boring week in defense news.” – Me, in our article-sharing chat channel

AAF Picks

Results time! Scores first, my picks from last Wednesday in parentheses.

  • Birmingham 12, Salt Lake 9 (Stallions +6.5): as in week 1, the strength of the Iron was defense.
  • Arizona 20, Memphis 18 (Arizona -10.5): swing and a miss. Arizona only won at all on the grounds of a late comeback.
  • Orlando 37, San Antonio 29 (Orlando -6.5): after Arizona’s stumble, Orlando has the best claim to offensive powerhouse status.
  • San Diego 24, Atlanta 12 (Atlanta +9.5): I was right on this one until San Diego kicked a garbage time field goal (35 seconds on the clock!) to pad their lead.

Record to date: 2-2. I beat this sportswriter, whose picks went 1-3. Were it not for the stupid last-second field goal, I would have been 3-1 and he would have been 0-4.

There are no AAF odds for week three out yet, so I’ll do my picks later in the week, either tomorrow or on Friday. Tomorrow, I have a long-ish AAF review scheduled, so I’ll defer deeper comment on the subject until then. (Excepting, of course, a few articles linked below.)

Defense

Guns

Science and Technology

  • Goodbye, A380 – Surprising nobody, really. The A380 was a relic of a hub-and-spoke era in a point-to-point one. Unlike the 747, which was designed with cargo in mind (that is, designed with a top-deck cockpit to allow for a hinged nose), the A380 lives and dies on passenger flights, and market preferences in passenger flights run in a different direction now. Fun fact: when Boeing and Airbus were considering a superjumbo collaboration, Boeing said no, it’s a bad idea.
  • The claim that Autopilot reduced Tesla crashes by 40% is statistically unsupportable – I’m willing to be pleasantly surprised if wrong, but I’m on the record saying that general-availability driverless cars are probably two decades away.
  • The rise and decline of the Makerbot Empire – Makerbot was the vanguard of the cheap-3D-printer movement. Back in the day, a $700 filament deposition model was considered cheap. Now, you can get a fancy resin printer for under $500. Contra Wired, I think they were pretty successful at ushering in a new era. They just didn’t stay market leaders.
  • What happens when techno-utopians actually win elections? – A case study from Italy. Spoiler: utopians are still humans, with human failings.
  • Hand transplants: thumbs up or thumbs down? – A very long-form article from Wired on the topic.

Grab Bag

Parvusimperator and the Attack of the Pistol Caliber Carbines

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When first introduced, I, like many others, was not a fan of the PCC Division in USPSA. Frankly, I thought it was rather silly to shoot a carbine at a pistol match, even if the “P” in USPSA stands for Practical. Given some time, I’ve come to reconsider the division. And frankly, I could do with some carbine practice, even if that carbine is firing 9mm rounds. I love shooting carbines. It’s my first shooting love, if I’m to wax romantic for a bit. Anyway, this is an opportunity to get some carbine practice in, with the benefit that I don’t need a rifle-rated backstop. This allows me to get some close-in practice on pistol ranges, which are a bit easier to find in my current area. Plus they’re fun to shoot.

With my goals of ‘fun carbine practice’ in mind, let’s see what I’ll end up getting. I do need a competition-worthy PCC. Since I explicitly want this to drill carbine handling and shooting up close, I can ignore all of the faux-SBR “pistols” out there. I don’t have a desire to fill out a Form 1 on this. My goal, strangely enough, is to buy my PCC, add a red-dot sight of some sort, and get shooting. For once, I’m not looking to build or tinker my way to a solution.

So. Ignore the faux-SBRs and just about anything that isn’t intended as a turnkey-competition gun. And, non-SBR barrels are going to get me closer to the handling of my carbines, which are also not SBRs. I’m also going to require my PCC to use Glock magazines, because those are cheap and good and I already have a lot of them (yes, I have some of the 33-round mags). That disqualifies a lot of perfectly good guns, but I don’t care. These are my criteria.

Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? I’m getting a JP GMR-15. It’s AR-15 based, so the feel and controls are the same. JP makes really nice stuff, and their 9mm carbines ‘just work’. Like their other carbines. It takes Glock mags, and it even has a functional last round bolt hold open. Not that it matters for a competition gun, but it’s nice to have. Oh, and it can be had with a sweet trigger.

The GMR-15 is a blowback-operated gun, like most other 9mm AR conversions. Technically speaking, a gas-operated gun would be softer. But we’re talking about a 9x19mm round fired from about seven pounds of carbine. Recoil is not going to be an issue. We’re principally concerned with movement of the dot, which can be controlled by adjusting the weights of the buffer and carrier. If we want to.

All that it’s going to need is a dot.

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Feb. 13, 2019)

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Leading off with a (temporary) new section…

The Alliance to Restore the Republic of American Football

That section title got away from me a bit. (If it were the Rebel Alliance of American Football, it would be the RAAF! That’s a fun acronym that isn’t in use anywhere else.) Anywho, it’s that awkward time of the sports year which falls between the end of the NFL playoffs and the start of the NFL preseason1, so the Alliance of American Football was an obvious thing to check out.

The short version is, it has promise, some of which is currently unrealized. The long version is, I’m writing a full post, so be patient. In the interests of having some extra fun with the league, I’ve decided to do picks against the spread for the remaining nine weeks of the season.

  • Salt Lake Stallions at Birmingham Iron (-6.5): I don’t have a good feel for this one, but I say Salt Lake covers. Birmingham didn’t generate much offense last time out, and a shutdown defense only takes you so far.
  • Arizona Hotshots (-10.5) at Memphis Express: Arizona in this one—the Hotshots are the pacesetters in the league right now, and Memphis is realizing that the Christian Hackenburg Show isn’t going to work.
  • Orlando Apollos (-6.5) at San Antonio Commanders: I like Orlando in this one. San Antonio looked iffy in their game last week against the Fleet.
  • Atlanta Legends at San Diego Fleet (-9.5): Atlanta to cover. I don’t think they’re bad enough to lose by 10 to the Fleet, who (despite being one of my chosen rooting interests this year) are not very good themselves.

Defense

History

Science and Technology

Guns

Grab Bag

  1. I may be glossing over some other sports somewhat. ↩

Borgundy’s Helicopter for All Seasons

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Time to do a procurement post for something I have been putting off: Utility Helicopters. This is a really crowded market, and the fact that we can probably get rid of anything on the really large end as being to similar to the CH-47 that we’ve already bought doesn’t help us very much. Since there are so many plausible options, let’s look at what we need, and then throw on some nice-to-haves that could hopefully narrow the field. That’s a lot more interesting than a deep dive into costs, and much more practicable for me (in that I’m actually willing to write it and I don’t need to track down pricing data).

First, just to simplify things a little, we want a fully combat-ready helicopter that’s been purchased by at least one other nation. Probably obvious, but it needs saying. No reinventing the rotor for this.

Next, we want a capacity of about a squad’s worth of men. As I write this, it occurs to me that I haven’t talked as much as I should about organization, and I certainly haven’t talked much about light infantry. We’ll pick ten combat-laden men as the minimum required capacity. Somewhat arbitrary, but that should cover most squad options. Note the emphasis on combat-laden; this is not a question of overall passenger capacity, but immediately usable passenger capacity for men ready to go into the fight.

Cargo capacity isn’t a huge deal, mostly because we already have CH-47s. I have no particular requirements for cargo capacity, other than there should be some. Certainly anything that meets the troop requirement above will have sufficient cargo capacity for our purposes.

We would also require medevac capability, but that is also no great burden, as most utility helicopter models available already have the capability to be easily reconfigured for stretchers.

Clearly, our utility helicopter should also have the ability to mount door guns, but again, this is no great burden. That’s a pretty standard utility helicopter feature. It would also be nice if we could mount pylons with some rockets for some extra support/attack capability. Also no great burden.

Now, let’s get on to some actual, difficult requirements. We’d like versions available with an aerial refueling probe. Specifically, we’d like this to facilitate longer-range search and rescue operations as well as long range special operations deployments. Fulfilling this is actually quite the tall order by the rules of our procurement game.

That gets us nicely to the UH-60 Blackhawk as our overall utility helicopter choice. It’s not the cheapest option, but it’s also not the most expensive, and it has the variants we want, namely the HH-60 with the refueling boom. And yes, that variant has been exported to South Korea. The Blackhawk is a proven choice, with plenty of export buys as well as good combat service. It also has an available gunship variant. As we’ll see in another post, it’s also one of the few utility helicopters to have an actual production electronic warfare variant. The Blackhawk is available with a bunch of integrated FLIR options (again, thanks HH-60), and there’s even a couple naval versions, should we want them.