I believe we’ve made a near-final carpet selection here at Many Words Press World HQ, which means the library will soon be a) done and b) capable of hosting the largest Little Wars battles yet, on the order of 15′ x 10′, which should easily support coalitions of more than 100 soldiers. Hopefully, we can bring you one of those in the not too distant future.
Defense
- A fun aerobatic display – Look at the outside guy go!
- USAF reverse-engineering parts for the B-2 – Presumably, because the supply chain for them no longer exists.
- Packing Helices into an Udaloy – Warship helicopter hangars: cramped.
- 5.7x28mm NATO – What an odd choice.
- Olivier Dassault dies in helicopter crash
- IAF F-15s photographed carrying Sparrows – The War Zone speculates as to why.
- 2021: China passes the US for fleet size?
- On that note, the US has almost four times as many VLS tubes as the whole of Europe, and that’s not even counting submarines
- The USSR had a railway-based ICBM with an inflatable nose – Video included.
Science and Technology
- Mathematician makes progress on the Collatz conjecture, or 3x + 1 problem – This being a particularly thorny part of math, the progress he made is proving it’s almost true for almost all numbers.
- Some mad Russians formed a transparent valve cover and oil pan, so you can look inside a running Lada engine
- Neural networks with multimodal neurons are vulnerable to text attacks – That is, if you label an apple ‘library’, the network identifies it as a library. Oops. Also, content warning: terrifying visions from the vilest darkness, if you look too closely at the synthetic maximum-activation images.
- New algorithm breaks record for linear equation solving – Turns out, with sparse systems, guessing randomly and iterating is faster than actually solving the system in the standard way.
History
Grab Bag
- Always worth bringing up: the US is ludicrously wealthy in GDP per capita
- The North Face (the clothing brand) snubbed an oil and gas company, so the Colorado Oil & Gas Association gave The North Face a tongue-in-cheek award for being an excellent customer – “Probably three-quarters of the mass they ship is actually our product,” quoth the head of the industry association.
- GIF of an Indonesian volcano erupting
Oof, utter hypocrisy from the North Face folks called out in full by Colorado Oil & Gas.
FN finally got their STANAG, two decades after they first fought for it. I’ve never shot any 5.7 myself, have you guys got any experience with the caliber?
I think it’s a fascinating curiosity, but not useful for all that much.
Parvusimperator says, “Solution in search of a problem.”
Let me elaborate a little. I’ve shot the Five Seven pistol, which is a very expensive plinking pistol with poor ergos. Shoots very flat.
I’ve also shot an actual full-auto P90 (range rental, I know a guy). It’s quite controllable. Almost hilariously so. Very easy to keep all 50 rounds on a steel silhouette target at…15 yards or so. As far as rentals go, a good (albeit expensive) choice, but I had more fun with things that spit more fire, like a 10.3″ MK 18-alike or ‘krinkov’ AK.
As far as issued weapons go, meh. 35 years ago, the soviet boogeyman was starting to get flak vests/soft armor as a general issue item, and that was about to render all the much beloved 9mm SMGs of western europe obsolete. By now,
SovietRussan soldiers are getting rifle plates that laugh at 5.7, and we have a ton of really compact 5.56mm carbines that are reliable (Mk 18, G36C, etc), which might not be quite as nice as a P90 to carry, but are far superior logistically. We’ve also seen a general contraction of armies anyway.Shoots light and fast and flat. Lethality is supposed to be similar to 9mm with a flatter trajectory – but this is from 6in barrels. It is loud with a lot of muzzle flash though.
Some people will say ‘its just a 22 mag’ – it is sort of. You’re getting .22 mag out of a 16 in barrel velocities from a 6 in pistol barrel.
Oh, and you can use rimfire scale suppressors with it which can save you a few bucks.
If it has good performance out of short barrels (4in or shorter) then it could fill the spectrum from ‘concealed everyday carry subcompact’ out to ‘carbine shooting out to 200 yard’ with one round.
But its not really a gamechanger by itself, IMO.
Too bad you can’t get any right now for less than 2 bucks a round.
That logic makes sense for me, although it also makes me want to shoot the P90. It might be a decent caliber for LEOs and maybe counter-terror SOF stuff, but probably not more general service.