Category Archives: All

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Sep. 30, 2020)

Autumn is now fully upon us here in western PA, and with the long, dark evenings comes more time for inside pursuits like writing. I have a biggish 2020 USPSA season wrap-up in the pipeline, along with some other revolver-related content (what can I say, I have a one-track mind), and parvusimperator has a few intriguing drafts going too.

War in the East: Azerbaijan and Armenia kick it off

A quick outline from Sunday
A web of major power backers quickly emerges – Pakistan and Turkey at least are in on the Azeri side. Russia and India are backing Armenia. France has spoken out against Turkey.
Turkey denies shooting down Armenian Su-25
At least the US has practiced this a bunch of times – Atropia and Limaria, classic combatants in American wargames, correspond almost exactly to Azerbaijan and Armenia. Unfortunately, the DCS Caucasus map doesn’t get quite far enough east and south.

Defense

Tim Taylor’s Chinook – About an extra 5,000 horsepower. Nice. Also, here’s a picture of a King Stallion carrying a Chinook; I don’t think I realized they were comparable in size, an embarrassing admission from the blog’s resident rotorhead.
The Sparrowhawk: a drone-launched drone – General Atomics says it can be recovered in flight, too.
Danes choose Elcan SpecterDR as their new daylight rifle scope – I don’t remember if parvusimperator ever got rid of his Elcan, but he sure does/did like it for what it was.
Pentagon proposals for a 500-ship navy – The War Zone calls them ‘highly questionable’.
In choice between CH-53K and CH-47, Germany chooses ‘neither’ – Germany will have to get by with its existing liftscrewers.

Pretty Pictures

A polished P-38

The ‘Rona and Associated Cultural Phenomena

We still don’t know if COVID is small-droplet airborne or large-droplet sneezeborne – Seems like we should have figured that out by now.
Yurts and heat lamps: outdoor dining in the New York winter – Around here, a lot of restaurants are opening back up at 50% indoor capacity, which I guess is fine? Our county is doing pretty well, and since we’re currently creatures of the suburbs, it’s not like there are many community cases floating around.
Meanwhile, in LA, faceless kitchens-in-a-strip-mall pretend to be a dozen different delivery-only brands at once
Maryland man jailed for one year for throwing a party – I’ve heard the term ‘midwit’ bandied about on Twitter, and don’t really like being that deliberately inflammatory, but I’m having a hard time thinking of a better word for the kind of person who celebrates a state governor imprisoning someone for organizing a peaceable assembly.

Science and Technology

This comet has an aurora – Not like ours. Maybe an aura is more accurate than an aurora?
Relevant to the below category: how to disappear in a smart city – If anything, the author does not show sufficient dedication to the idea. She doesn’t seem to have quite decided that true disappearance requires leaving your phone behind.
D-Wave releases an next-gen quantum annealing chip – Interesting technology, but I keep on hearing that whenever D-Wave makes a quantum leap (ha), classical hardware and algorithms catch up pretty quickly.

China

Xinjiang-tested, now Tibet-applied: China’s reeducation camps arrive in a second region
Indian geostrategist: China is paying a high price for provoking India – Parvusimperator, succinctly: “Good. Fuck ’em.”
CCP rewrites the Bible: Jesus chooses to stone the sinner woman to teach respect for the law – ‘To hell with that’ is less an expression of disgust and more an observation, in this case.
‘China feels increasingly like North Korea,’ says WaPo reporter
We’re not making any friends among the ChiComs this week, are we? Well, see parvusimperator’s earlier comment.

Guns Etc.

I’ve been looking for a good glove I can use for revolver work: matches on hot days, and practice generally, when the cylinder quickly gets too hot for reloads – Parvusimperator shared this review. They look pretty good. I don’t actually need a ton of dexterity, since I only ever wear one on my left hand, and that hand’s only jobs are playing support on the two-hand grip, holding the (potentially hot) cylinder during reloads, and thumbing the ejector.
The logic error behind the gun debate – I have noticed this in talking to my largely-lefty college friends. At least it’s less awkward than explaining the colors of USPSA targets.
Remington chopped up, sold off – Ruger bought Marlin, which seems like a good match. I look forward to a Ruger-brand lever gun.

Decision 2020

Larry Correia, ex-tax accountant, opines on the Trump tax leak – “On the other side, you know damned good and well that the IRS has sent their most fearsome auditor against him. This man sold his soul to the devil, and then fined the devil for failing to list that soul as a depreciable asset.”
The debate in pictures – Well, one picture. … more a meme, really.

Grab Bag

As ever, the revolutionary vanguard comprises dumb rich kids
A generalist lockpicking kit – I’m not good enough with my picks to really make much use of this information, but it’s nevertheless good information.
Ever thought, “Man, the Niven-Pournelle novel Footfall was a great alien invasion story; I wish I could play it in game form?” – Well, the Terra Invicta kickstarter has you covered. I haven’t chipped in yet, but I’m excited for it.

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Sep. 23, 2020)

Posted by Fishbreath

Any thoughts on what we should do for the upcoming 100th edition of What We’re Reading?

WuFlu

Is SARS-CoV-2 a product of gain-of-function research? – Gain-of-function research being the head-scratching idea that it’s somehow wise or worthwhile to turn viruses which can’t infect humans into viruses which can, to, I dunno, see if it can be done? Cue Ian Malcolm quote.
In that tweet, a guy called Peter Daszak is quoted on the subject of enhancing ‘SARS-related CoVs’, back in November 2019 – Here he is in Boston Magazine, identified as president of an organization that funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology, vehemently denying that research at that institute which involved identifying spike proteins that could cause bat viruses to infect humans and making new viruses from them could have possibly caused a human outbreak of a bat coronavirus in Wuhan.
Elsewhere in that Twitter thread, there’s some speculation that virologists who (rightfully, it seems to me) consider gain-of-function research to be an awful idea aren’t speaking up for professional reasons; who wants to be remembered as the person who caused the entire world to ban their field of research? Besides people with a sense of perspective, or, you know, morals.

Defense

Experts: “Next war likely to be fought differently than last war” – Really staking out a bold position there, guys.
Big Army bows to defense contractor pressure, will not be entering its own vehicle into OMFV Redux – Shame. It would have been nice to have a first-party design. We’ve gotten away from that for some reason, and it seems like it was a strictly superior way to do business in hindsight.
Marines now building ‘littoral regiments’ with an eye on taking Chinese airfield-islands – Parvusimperator’s remark, lightly paraphrased because I can’t be bothered to find it in the internal chat backscroll: “I love the Marines’ small-unit stuff, but I scratch my head at their strategy.”

3D-Printed Guns

A special topic! There have been exciting developments in the field.

“Mom, can we have Mauser Broomhandle?” – We have Mauser Broomhandle at home. See the link to finish the joke.
You’ve seen 3D-printed ARs, now with reinforcing U-bolts, but what about a 3D-printed AK? – Receiver is gloriously chunky, for strength to match iron soldiers of motherland.
Want an illegal suppressor without having to deal with the fed-bait of ordering a fuel filter housing from China? – Here’s a version you can print, just add your own entirely innocent hardware. I don’t advocate 3D-printing illegal things, but I do certainly advocate knowing how.

Non-3D-Printed Guns

Karl of InRange TV making every effort at fairness in re: a volley-fire .22 WMR revolver – Unrelated to the topic at hand, I find myself less enthused with InRange’s match videos now that I’ve had a few years to get used to USPSA. The InRange-style 2-gun match, with its excessive reliance on physical challenges and punitive par times, is not as interesting to me as it once was.
T̶h̶r̶o̶w̶b̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶T̶h̶u̶r̶s̶d̶a̶y̶ Wayback Wednesday: Steyr’s scout rifle, an American Rifleman review from 1998 – The second gun I bought was a Mosin carbine, which I proceeded to turn into a scout-ish rifle. I still like it, although I haven’t had any of my rifles out to the range in quite some time now. I should have a go at the 550-yard plate at my new range with the K31, though.
The price of Remington’s ammo plants, its most valuable asset: $65 million – Blast. That’s a bit steep for just the two of us. Maybe they’ll sell primers? I could really use some small pistol primers.
From the ads in USPSA magazine: the Gill Arms GPR 9M, a striker-fired pistol with… innovations? – At least, I think they’re innovations. For one, the passive safety is that the striker is locked out of line with the primer until the trigger is pulled. For another, the magazine tapers in two different places, which is evidently better for reliability? Not having $800 to spend on a random pistol, I can’t say if any of that is true. Even if I did have the $800, I don’t see any for sale.

Other Science and Technology

Watch an internal combustion engine turn into an external internal combustion engine – It looks like a runaway to me. Turbo springs a leak, and suddenly your engine has a bunch more fuel, and therefore starts spinning faster, and the cycle continues until the engine escapes.
Why is the world becoming more allergic to food? – The story doesn’t actually answer the question in the headline, but does suggest that eating trigger foods at a young age stops food allergies from developing.
A teenager with an integrated circuit fab in his parents’ garage – He doesn’t have a clean room, so contamination means he can’t get much below 10µm feature size, but he could pretty conceivably make simple, 70s-era microprocessors. That’s wild.

History

Want a document on the Maus tank from Allied researchers? – Here you go. I even put it in the Many Words Google Drive, so you don’t have to deal with a stupid 100-second download delay and a speed cap at 60 kilobytes per second.
How chunky is the P-47? – This chunky. The original Twitterer stole my joke, so you get this instead.
The Record of Proceedings of the Board of Inquiry into the loss of USS Thresher is now available, in only lightly-redacted form

Decision 2020 Etc.

Princeton says racism is embedded in the structures of the university; DOE opens investigation – “… such an admission from [Princeton president] Eisgruber raises concerns that Princeton has been receiving tens of millions of dollars in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Inject the schadenfreude into my veins, please.
Portland sees surge in shootings after mayor disbands PD’s gun crimes unit – Whoever could have seen this coming?

Grab Bag

Fake Counterstrike cheats that sabotage the player using them – Brilliant. Hopefully not staged.
Chinese propaganda or canny realpolitik? You decide – It’s a (paywalled) story on the topic of why China as she is now might be preferable to a democratic China. (If you are offended by paywalls, consider this extension). One of the arguments is, “A democratic China might be less patient in dealing with Hong Kong and Taiwan,” which seems to me to be definitively missing the point of the Hong Kong protests, and plausibly missing the point of Taiwan’s continued preference for independence. Would Taiwan care so much if its putative motherland were a democratic state with a bunch of guaranteed freedoms? I am not qualified to say.
Fun approaches that make me want Flight Simulator (2020) – St. Bart’s, in the Caribbean.
A poker cheating scandal story – With no solid evidence that there was actually any cheating happening, although a good bit of probabaility and circumstantial evidence suggesting it did.

Rule the Waves 2: To May, 1942

Posted by Fishbreath

A very busy August and a moderately busy first half of September are now behind us, so. Let’s see, where were we…

Ah, yes, it’s August 1940, and we’re crossing swords with the Austrians again. It sounds like the plan was, more or less, ‘crush Austria’, so that’s what we’ll do.

August 1940

Bit of a bummer to have one of our three carriers under repair, I have to say. Happily, she’ll be back at the beginning of 1941, and shortly after, we’ll have some fresher light cruisers too.

The first battle of this new update is a destroyer action in the Adriatic: nine French ships against a yet-unknown number of Austrians. We’re very near our air support, but it’s also twilight-soon-to-be-night, so we may not get the advantage of being within forty miles of around 120 friendly aircraft.

Just after night falls, we pick up some radar contacts 16,000 yards toward land. I guess we’ll try some blind torpedo launching.

…

Several in-game hours of frenetic micromanagement later, it turns into one of the most lopsided French victories in history: in exchange for the loss of one destroyer, the unlucky recipient of a brace of Austrian torpedoes early in the battle, we sink thirteen Austrian ships.

Not all of it is do to with my adroit tactics. Part of it comes to shipbuilding. Our recent Espignole-class destroyers are superb ships, fast and heavily armed, and for once we outmatch the Austrian hardware.

September 1940

I decline two battles to start the month, but the third catches my eye: a cruiser action off Brest. I don’t have any cruisers in the North Atlantic, but I do have the 27-knot battleship Rouen and an awful lot of aircraft. We’ll see how it plays out.

It plays out by them saying ‘no thanks’, and we get another destroyer action in the Adriatic. This time, it’s 11:00 a.m., so our tremendous quantities of air power should factor in.

Six French ships on seven Austrians, and we sank their modern destroyer fleet last time out. (They only have nine in service at present, so a big win here would basically eliminate the Austrian destroyer force.) Hopefully, this is a straightforward victory.

Since I don’t want to get any more of my ships torpedoed, I’m playing this one a little more cautiously than has historically been my style, staying at near-maximum gun range.

A long history of gunnery practice has made the French fleet a fearsome force in long-range gun duels, and by 12:51 p.m., the balance of hits is already substantially in our favor.

The afternoon sees some trading of blows by air strikes, though the French bombers come out looking better. It seems like a relatively dreary destroyer battle, wherein the vastly superior French ships sink a bunch of obsolete Austrian ones, when at 4:19 p.m., I see this report…

Surely there’s not a carrier out to play in a destroyer action? Then again, it’s awfully hard for even the greenest of land-based dive bomber pilots to mistake a destroyer for a carrier.

The next bombers in line ID it as a light cruiser, which means that whoever was in charge of the radio report from the first attack should probably be sacked.

A bit later in the afternoon, another few waves of aircraft find the target previously identified as a carrier and a light cruiser, and proceed to identify it as a battleship and a destroyer, which more or less runs the gamut of possibility.

In the end, it turns out to have been a destroyer.

October 1940

Maddeningly, the Austrians sue for peace before we’ve crushed them sufficiently to gain Morocco, either by treaty or by invasion. I guess we’ll just have to cheese them off again and try to win more slowly next time.

The peace dividend is a little easier to deal with this time; I mothball a few battleships and most of our old destroyers, and we’re sufficiently set so that the money will be there in a few months, as shipyard jobs finish.

Speaking of which, it’s still four months until Bearn finishes her refit.

November 1940

Evidently, I had a medium bomber prototype request in progress. This time, I pick the shortest-range option, because it can carry an aerial torpedo 565 nautical miles. This is a massive force multiplier for our land-based air. No longer will they have to ineffectually attempt to hit moving ships from moving planes!

December 1940

A bit of saber-rattling toward Japan brings our budget back into the black, even though we’re spending almost 13,000 funds per month on ship construction.

March 1941

A new light cruiser design appears, similar to our existing Friants but with one fewer turret and a pair of floatplane scouts.

June 1941

A fascist coup takes place in Germany, and their flag changes once more to something a bit more historically familiar.

August 1941

Given that we lost a destroyer or two in the preceding war, I update the Espignole class into the Carqouis class, and plan to start one or two building in the next month. Once our cruiser Sfax finishes in two months, I’ll start another light cruiser.

September 1941

New aircraft types enter operational service; most of our combat planes are of 1941 vintage. The only thing left to upgrade is the floatplane scout, so I do that.

November 1941

Eh, cancel the starting another light cruiser. Maintenance and new aircraft construction are eating into our funds a bit, so we only have a 933-funds surplus of the 1,663 it’ll cost.

We’re able to build 80-plane airbases now, so I start to expand some of our most strategic ones—in particular, those suited to strike at Austria-Hungary and Italy, the one at Brest, and those closest to Germany.

January 1942

It’s a little confusing to be deep in the war years, and yet not have any wars on.

We do figure out the forward-firing ASW mortar, which is a delightfully useful tool. I prepare an upgrade of our escort-style Arc-class destroyer with one mounted.

February 1942

We have now developed airborne radar sets! I guess that’ll make our future search planes even better? Or maybe just better at hunting submarines.

May 1942

I’m going to pause here, not because I’m out of stamina for the game, but because the carrier Egalité just entered service, and her final sibling Terreur will be arriving in a few months. That means we’re going to have money hors du wazoo, which means interesting decisions.

Plans and Intentions

The first issue is one of strategy. It would be nice to snipe Morocco off of Austria-Hungary, but Austria keeps on wimping out of wars. Is there someone else we should go after? If so, who?

The next is one of shipbuilding. How do we stack up against the world?

We’re extremely light on dreadnoughts compared to the world leaders, and on par with to slightly light on them compared to other countries in the Mediterranean. We’re middle of the pack on carriers, but our French Revolution-themed class, at 35,000 tons, are the largest carriers in service in the world, and carry 90 aircraft to the next best carrier’s 60. (The Americans are catching up here.) We have one carrier under construction, due to be finished in six months.

As ever, we have almost no heavy cruisers. We do, on the other hand, have a ton of light cruisers, but only seven of them are on hand in Europe or the Mediterranean, with the rest scattered around the globe to fulfill our colonial service obligations. Only four of our European ships are truly modern. We have one light cruiser under construction, due to be finished in 10 months.

We’re in decent shape on destroyers, especially compared to our fellow Mediterranean countries, although it should be noted that twelve of them, soon to be 15, are multi-purpose corvette-ish ships, and many of them are obsolescent. The other four destroyers we have under construction are modern, fleet service ships, of the kind that so adroitly slaughtered the Austrian destroyer force.

We’re behind on submarines, but between our airbases and our carriers, we have the most naval aircraft in the world, a lead we’ll only expand on as our airbases in strategic areas grow and our carrier force gets larger.

So, with those facts in mind, what do we build? We have a surplus of 3,410 funds right now (a pretty good carrier, a bad battleship, a cruiser and a half, two light cruisers, six to ten destroyers). In the next 11 months, we’ll have an additional 8,000 or so funds to allocate. We could afford a battleship or two, but that era is more or less behind us. We could spend it on more carriers, a newer destroyer force, the start of a modern cruiser force… really, the world is our oyster.

What’s it going to be?

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Sep. 16, 2020)

Posted by Fishbreath

Buckle up. We’ve got a lot to cover this week, and (because I submitted more articles than parvusimperator) a myriad of topics.

China

Defense

I got almost all the way through the week’s articles before I had to start a defense section.

Greece is buying Rafales – Standoffs with the perfidious Turk have convinced it of the need for modernization.
CG Haenel’s MK556 gets the nod to replace Bundeswehr G36en – This has been discussed some on the Discord, which is linked in the sidebar for those of you who are reading this but have not yet popped in over there.
USAF announces they’ve built and flown a full-scale prototype of the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter – Unusually loose-lipped for the Air Force!
… shortly after someone on Twitter reported a bunch of sightings of a strange triangle-shaped airplane? – They’re almost certainly unrelated, but I thought the timing was fun. Lots of speculation among people who don’t follow the defense industry all that closely that maybe the F-35’s massive budget is actually a slush fund for other projects.

Science and Technology

Story of the week: potential biosigns detected on Venus – Phosphine, a chemical which is rapidly degraded into its component bits by UV light (during the press briefing, they said a lifetime of a few thousand seconds is believed to be accurate), is present in moderate quantities in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Planetary scientists spent a few years trying to puzzle out non-biological processes which could create phosphone, and came up empty. My money’s still on some bit of novel high-temperature/high-pressure chemistry. Anyway, I need to pop over to Twitter and goad Musk into sending a probe.
Do masks actually work against the wuflu? – I think the data is more up in the air than Mr. Berenson’s Tweet suggests, but at the same time, the point about Taiwan, Japan, and testing is worth bearing in mind.
Deep sea mining and the race to the bottom of the sea – We’ve explored almost none of the extremely-deep ocean. Should we start mining it and potentially destroy all those ecosystems? I have not yet fully formed an opinion.
The ISS is getting moldy – On the inside, which is great news for fans of old-feeling science fiction but not so great news for fans of long-term space habitats. NASA is working on ways to kill ’em.
NASA to investigate 3D printing for rocket part production – Good for small-batch rocket production, perhaps, but come, let us reason with one another. If you take Elon Musk at 10% of his word, he’s still going to build hundreds of rockets, which translates to thousands of engines. At that scale, it seems like a factory, with fancy tooling and all, makes fiscal sense, and small-batch rocket production does not make sense.
Another cosmological problem surfaces: the universe might be too spread-out
But wait, there’s more: a disc galaxy at the very edge of the observable universe looks way older than it should – C’mon, dark-matter-as-the-luminiferous-ether-of-the-21st-century guess! Turn out to be correct!

History

High-resolution imaging of the wreck of the Hornet on the sea floor – Way to go, Petrel.
Alternate uses of the V8-powered air raid sirens: turning fog into rain – The noise is so intense that it vibrates the fog particles together until they precipitate out, a quintessentially American solution to a problem the British solved by lighting bonfires instead. I believe it could also kill birds at a pretty substantial distance for, you know, a siren.

Guns

It’s a match video week – I’m getting a little tiny bit faster now, it seems like, but one thing holding me back is accuracy troubles. A good proportion of the problem is with me: I have a bad habit of trying to actively control muzzle rise with my hands, which leads to shots pushed low or pulled right if my hands tense prior to the shot breaking. Some of the rest might be with grips; I could probably stand to have some slightly larger ones so there’s more room for my off hand. The only problem is that a lot of the alternatives are really perishingly ugly.
Kalashnikov makes a smart shotgun, but not the way you’re thinking – It has a wee computer in the stock, a screen, and a video camera built in.
Restoring an old Smith & Wesson semi-auto](https://www.glocktalk.com/a/s-w-5906-restore.118/) – Restoration continues here. We appreciate good craftsmanship here at the Soapbox.
Remember that SIG P320 lawsuit about people accidentally shooting themselves in the leg? Here’s a good potential explanation – It seems to explain the strange, nearly-disengaged-sear problems described in that lawsuit.

Grab Bag

Will mass political violence happen in the US? – This guy says ‘no’. I don’t know if I quite agree, but I do hope he’s right.
737 crew from Lithuania’s Klasjet fails basic airmanship test
Old but good: nobody knows how many US federal laws there are
Cal Fire: “The smoke is too bad for helicopters.” National Guard: “Ha!” – The SF Chronicle takes a deep dive into the High Sierra helo rescue.
The New Yorker braces itself: how Trump could win
A modest proposal: permanent daylight saving time – Please, yes. I hate driving into work in the dark and then driving home from work in the dark.
The ISO standard political ad
A tale of water rights and subdevelopments in the southwestern desert – I sure am glad to live in a place where water literally falls from the sky, although this summer it has been admittedly less than I would typically prefer.
Donald Trump, …Nobel Peace Prize candidate? – First Serbia and Kosovo, now peace in the Middle East? I confess that’s not the sort of thing I very much expected out of a Trump administration.

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Sep. 9, 2020)

Posted by Fishbreath

While drafting these, I keep on forgetting I’ve already shared match videos, and have to go dig them out later. Oops.

Defense

The new British carriers have always looked a bit fat to me – They may not be true carriers with catapults and arresting gear, but having two of them does count for something.
An EC-135 at Mildenhall in 1991 demonstrated that airliner-form-factor aircraft have quite a bit of thrust to spare at light loads
Charles de Gaulle and Izumo, to the same scale – The year is 2028. The War of the South China Sea is heating up. In a Mitsubishi warehouse, engineers pull the tarps off an angled flight deck attachment for Izumo…
Big Army to field a ground-launched strike SM-6 – It’s similar in concept, I suppose, to the ADATS—one missile, multiple missions. Too, ‘medium-range strike’ conflicts much less with ‘air defense’ than does ‘anti-tank’—the tough thing about ADATS is that using the missiles on tanks feels like a waste, or at least it did when I gamed it out in Armored Brigade.
US looking for a NATO-like alliance in the Pacific
Apaches to sling Spike NLOS missile – It’s the hi in a hi-lo setup, with the lo being JAGM… except JAGM, the less-capable missile, is also the more expensive one. In the time since the JAGM project started, the UK developed and deployed Brimstone… and then Brimstone 2.
India tests hypersonic scramjet vehicle? – Welcome to the club!
China has a space plane; here’s where it lands
For light ambush-protected vehicles, Thales charges Australia double what the American option would have cost – Cost disease: not just an American malady.

Guns

Shocker! Gun sales skyrocket in regions struck by rioting
Analyzing the circuit split on magazine bans – In which John Roberts is a squish on guns.
Chrono trip coming up – These .38 Short Colts are better for USPSA revolver than full-length .38 Special—they flop less in the moon clips, and eject rather than partially. I just need to find a load that a) makes power factor and b) does not blow up.

Science and Technology

In China, GitHub is a bastion of free speech – Because GitHub is HTTPS-only, China can’t ban repositories individually, and China’s technology industry has enough clout to keep the Party from banning GitHub altogether.

Riots etc.

Al Sharpton: “latte liberals” want to defend the NYPD, average black people recognize the need for police – Something about stopped clocks and right twice a day.
Latte liberals give homeless men the bum’s rush – Unlike in Hank Scorpio’s utopia, they will not be allowed to go at their own pace.

Grab Bag

Eternal Brexit – The article didn’t quite pay off the title—in particular, it seems to insinuate that Brexit is, rather than being eternal, likely to come to some sort of conclusion as the EU tires of the whole process.
The planning of US physician shortages – It’s because think tanks in the 80s concluded that there would be a glut of physicians, and people made plans based on that.

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Sep. 2, 2020)

Posted by Fishbreath

Two weeks and a short post is what you get when both of your hosts are on the road and/or occupied in such a way as to prevent a great deal of reading.

Coronavirus

Manhattan commercial landlords peering over the precipice – My boss was just saying the other day how maybe it’s time to start looking for a smaller, cheaper office.
Speaking of New York institutions collapsing under coronavirus-related strain, the MTA is losing $200 million a week – … how? Amtrak’s projected losses for 2020 in its entirety are $700 million.

Defense

Chinese submarine enters cave facility: satellite photos – A man in a golden suit met it there, as guards in nondescript, unmarked uniforms proceeded to unload gold bars from its cargo hold. Part of this entry is fiction.
Everything old is new again: French star-fort-FOBs in Mali
Ski Jump Super Bug: coming soon to an Indian carrier near you?
SHORAD Stryker looking pretty good – The upside to having a cheap, badly armored AFV chassis is that it’s a great base to stick other crap on top of, cf. M113.
Did we fly a U-2 over China’s naval exercises? – We can neither confirm nor deny, etc. etc.
SINKEX footage!

Guns

Video from my first USPSA major match – Not only as a shooter, but also as staff. It was a good time. Probably a bit late for any other ones this year, but that’s fine—I have some gear updates to work on anyway.
Making a heavyweight Glock – An older video, especially considering Mr. Humble Marksman has since moved on to a Beretta.
Busting PMAG durability myths – … by shooting one that sat loaded for twelve years.

Grab Bag

The wildest insurance fraud scheme Texas has ever seen – This dude has lived an extremely interesting life, which is his stated goal.
The Air and Space Museum is working on digitizing a bunch of amazing color photos of WW2 – Color photography always makes history seem more real to me.
Say what you like about the ChiComs, but they sure can do good propaganda – It’s a bunch of drones making a 3D light show in the sky.
Cracking the scratch lottery code – An oldie, but a goodie.
Remember the 1970s, and the left’s domestic terror campaign back then? – Good to be reminded that urban violence is nothing new.

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Aug. 19, 2020)

Posted by Fishbreath

We’ll call it a biweekly-what-we’re-reading this time.

Your correspondent writes to you from the New Mexico countryside, watching the scrubland give way to thin forest as the Southwest Chief wends its way toward Chicago.

Random Thoughts

One of the set of frequently-wrong ‘thought leaders’ on Twitter (Yglesias, maybe?) had the shocking realization that, although Chicago started as a rail hub, it’s now mainly a large city on the basis of network effects. Like, you know, every city.
The Planes of Fame museum in Chino, CA is worth a visit, if you’re into airplane museums. They have the only airworthly A6M with an original Nakajima engine.

WuFlu

How to test every American for the coronavirus every day – The short version: spit test strips at a low, low price per unit. As accurate as PCR testing? No, but much easier to mass produce. It would cost a few billion dollars, but you can find that behind the sofas on Capitol Hill, and the economic benefits would be massive.

Defense

Royal Australian Regiment looking into 60mm platoon mortars – I’m on board with the idea.
Not new, but Australia has a procurement decision-making framework that seems to be working pretty well – Better than the American system of, “Start the project and cancel it before completion seventeen times in a row,” certainly. Parvusimperator’s TLDR of the Australian framework: “If there’s an obvious choice, skip the competition, buy the obvious choice, and move on.”
We’re selling the Qataris the AMRAAM-ER – That’s an AMRAAM seeker on an ESSM body. Next up: Washington, DC.
Whither the MiG-35? – The Drive suggests the answer is, “Onto the scrap heap alongside a bunch of other modernization projects, in favor of more Flankers.”
Bell reveals V-280 naval variants
Also, gunships – I dunno. As a rotorhead flight simmer, I still think I prefer a proper helicopter.
Strykers with lasers on their heads
The Bruce Krulak Center speculates, by means of essay contests, on ways the USMC might vanish
USAF working hard on the F-16’s new AESA
Also, the F-16 is getting pylons with built-in MAWS and countermeasures systems – That’s a pretty clever place to stick the sensors, given that your average F-16 is pretty crowded already.
Drone swarms! – For EW purposes, among other things. It’s a nifty plan.
Flying the YF-23 – And its fancy flight control system.
To replace the BMP-2, Hungary selects the Lynx – Which might, in turn, make the Lynx more attractive to the Aussies and their Land 400 program.

Guns

Testing rifle muzzle brakes – The methodology is ingenious. Parvusimperator has some additional thoughts, which I believe he’s turning into a full post.
Parvusimperator and I saw, in the latest issue of the USPSA magazine, a review of a custom-fit earplug guy. Unfortunately, he isn’t coming this far north this year. Fortunately, I ran across Decibullz, a silly name for a mold-your-own-earplugs solution. I haven’t had very good luck with in-ear protection beyond you classic orange foamies, but I’m hopeful that a custom fit and the so-called percussive filters will a) serve more comfortably for a full day of shooting, and b) let me hear things while still blocking shooting noise. There will be a review to come.
Duncan v. Becerra opinion – The train wending its way toward Chicago originated in the greater LA area, where my wife and I spent some time quarantining with her family, who are also people of the gun, and you can bet this was a topic of excited conversation.

Grab Bag

Beirut blast in pictures – Yes, we’re a bit slow off the mark on this story, but that’s the downside of the biweekly timeline.
Tracing the path of the Rhosus, whose load of ammonium nitrate, abandoned 7 years ago, caused the explosion
Italian explosives expert suspects that it was more than just ammonium nitrate – Bring your own Google Translate.
Hong Kong turned into your average mainland Chinese city real quick, after the passage of that national security law
The story that actually frames it in those terms – It’s been a while since I’ve put one of these together, okay?
NY billionaires vote for Democrats, find themselves targeted by Marxists – Parvusimperator, a native of the Empire State, requested a tiny violin.
Hollywood executives getting canned at an alarming rate – Well, alarming if you’re a Hollywood exec, I guess. There is very little sympathy for them in our internal chat; certainly, there’s more for the ordinary salaryman who gets laid off.
Google kills off business-to-business products too

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Aug. 5, 2020)

Posted by Fishbreath

If I call it ‘Weekly What We’re Reading’, maybe I won’t have to feel so bad about missing Wednesdays.

Coronavirus

Why aren’t we talking more about ventilation? – Your correspondent has been banging the ‘malaria in the literal sense’ drum with increasing intensity over the past few weeks.
Cuomo to wealthy New Yorkers: “Come back to the city! I’ll buy you a drink!” – … in what bar?

Defense

Last of the 29 Palms Abrams moves on – Pour one out. They’re bound to Barstow, and then on to Sierra Army Depot, where they’ll be mothballed.
India’s Rafales arrive – India has some special features not found on Ye Standard French Rafale.
How Britain cut its Harrier force to zero in two months – i.e., not a happy story.
Video of the week: Rheinmetall’s 130mm test
A TFB interview with leaders of the NGSW program on same
IAI and Singapore Technologies Engineering form Proteus Advanced Systems – They’re selling an export version of the Gabriel 5, for which STE provides parts. Singapore, notably, is in the market for a Harpoon replacement.
Two diagrams and a lot of technical Russian – It’s the T-14/T-15 reversible hull patent! Parvusimperator notes the chassis is an earlier design, with only six road wheels per side.
Britain Used To Be So Cool, historical photo edition – It’s the Royal Navy at Spithead, on the occasion of Elizabeth’s coronation. (Cor, she’s been around a while, hasn’t she?)
Poland agrees to pay most costs for US troop presence – Poland remembers 1939. And, as ever, American troops in Europe are a tripwire more than anything—both a deterrent and a way to get the American population behind an overseas adventure.
USAF’s THPMOR system to see field tests – USAF calls it ‘THOR’, but that leaves out ‘Power’ and ‘Microwave’.
Raytheon and Rafael collaborate for an Indirect Fire Protection Capability stopgap – Iron Dome! American Iron Dome!

Science and Technology

SpaceX finally successfully hops a Starship prototype – This one is SN5, and I believe they blew up the preceding four. Accidentally, that is.
Chicago has a deep underground stormwater control tunnel – 30 stories down. Chicago has a long history of absurd engineering feats to keep from flooding itself, whether with rainwater or sewage. There was a great 99 Percent Invisible on the subject, before every episode turned into progressive preaching.

Guns

Gun owners aren’t coming to save protesters in cities – For a number of blazingly obvious reasons.
The Care and Feeding of Your Revolver with Jerry Miculek – As a Ruger shooter, I feel like I have the right as well as the obligation to note that a number of these are things you shouldn’t do to your Smith & Wesson revolver.
Los Angeles DA’s husband charged for what the Missouri lawyers did – This seems to me to be a sort of comeuppance. It may well get tossed out in court on the same grounds—California is, to my deep and utter surprise, a Castle Doctrine state.
Trijicon sues Holosun – It’s a patent thing. Here are the exhibits referenced in the complaint.
EOTech going private – It was at first, then it was purchased by a large, public defense contractor, now it’s getting spun off and sold to American Holoptics.

Grab Bag

Tim Keller with a Biblical critique of secular ideas of social justice – I see an awful lot of the students I once had during my brief stints in student ministry falling prey to this ideology, so I intend to dig into this more deeply sometime.

Rule the Waves 2: To July, 1940

Posted by Fishbreath

It has been several weeks, but the end of summer has proven to be busy. Unfortunately, it’s likely to be several more weeks before the next one. Happily, parvusimperator seems to have briefly regained his muse; with a little luck, he’ll cover me for a while.

Also, this update turned out to be all text, so we’ll see how closely you’re paying attention. There’ll be a quiz next week.

November 1938

Scrapping the three light carriers, the bevy of obsolete corvettes, and our five oldest submarines, mothballing three battleships and Latouche-Treville, and pausing one of our carriers under construction saves us enough money to move forward. We’re still shedding about 2,700 funds per month, but before we run out of money, we’ll finish building enough things to get back in the black.

Objectives remain as they’ve always been: crush Austria-Hungary, take Morocco, complete our domination of Africa (at least the parts not occupied by the Royal Navy).

It occurs to me that a fun ‘boss fight’ might be v. the UK, provided we can keep the US (or perhaps a resurgent Communist Germany?) on our side.

December 1938

A rebellion breaks out in New Calendonia, halfway around the globe. Evidently a lack of naval force there made it possible. Well, this month, our redeployments should bring our forces around the globe back into accordance with the requirements.

We also unlocked 6″ dual-purpose guns (not a sure bet; the chance to get that tech is relatively low), a perfect thing with which to equip our next light cruiser.

Finally, naval intelligence provides us with a brief on how we shot down enemy aircraft in the most recent war. We shot down 27 in total; here’s the breakdown.

Fighters: 15
Heavy AA: 8
Light AA: 3
Other aircraft (i.e., defensive armament): 1

So, the clear lesson here is that fighters are the answer, and heavy AA failing that. We didn’t quite face enough air attacks to draw further conclusions, which I suspect accounts for light AA being more effective than medium AA.

January 1939

The government wants to further cut the naval budget, in response to which we put our foot down, throw a tantrum, and manage to head off such wooly-headed talk with only minor concessions.

February 1939

Thanks to the press fearmongering about Italy, we get a nice bump in budget, nearly clearing out our deficit. Since tensions with Italy are already in the high yellow, I’m also going to start moving the fleet into the Mediterranean.

May 1939

French engineers develop an improved surface search radar, which we’ll start mounting to ships as soon as possible.

Only 11 ships in the entirety of the French Navy are not radar-equipped at present—an advantage we may be able to press in a hypothetical war with Italy.

July 1939

Tweaking Austria-Hungary again leads to increased budget. We’re already in the black.

August 1939

Between that increased budget and some global economic expansion, we have enough money for me to bring our three mothballed battleships up to reserve fleet status—wise, considering the rising tensions with Italy and Austria—and to re-activate Latouche-Treville.

September 1939

New Caledonia has thrown off the yoke of its French colonialist oppressors! Which is not great for us, except in that it doesn’t seem to affect our score and also reduces our overseas force requirements enough to bring a Troude home. So actually, it’s pretty great for us.

We also bring a new torpedo bomber into service. It can sling a torpedo as a medium bomb load, which means it has a combat radius of some 380 miles.

October 1939

We go from a slight budget deficit to a surplus of 5,200 funds per month, on the back of a few events and the completion of 12 destroyers. I put the money into a new carrier design (Egalité, except with a deck park and deck-edge lifts for improved aircraft capacity and ease of handling) and another of the Friant-type light cruisers. (I may see about a smaller 6″-gun option to help build out our numbers again.)

November 1939

Several more money-boosting events free up enough moeny for a few more of our corvette-destroyers.

I try a few things to build a better cruiser than the Friant, but the Friant seems to have a pretty good balance of just about everything. Another one goes into the yards.

February 1940

Three submarines and the new Egalité begin construction. I also decide to spend a bit of money rebuilding Bearn, our original carrier. She gains a much heavier AA fit and capacity for six more planes.

April 1940

Morane-Saulnier gets the nod for our next model of dive bomber, with a 1000lb-bomb range of 225 miles and a 250lb-bomb range similar to that of our torpedo bombers.

May 1940

Quite a short break between wars, it looks like. We accuse Austria of torpedoing our old battleship Rouen, driving tensions nearly to the limit.

June 1940

Italy’s rattling sabers, too. Might we get the chance to take on both of our Mediterranean rivals at once?

July 1940

Austria-Hungary declares war.

The first battle is a convoy defense, our destroyers against theirs in the fading moments of dusk. Radar suggests it’s nine of ours against eight of theirs.

It turns out to be exactly so. The French destroyer forces, with the massive advantage of radar—we were able to torpedo the Austrian line from beyond visual range—sink four of the attacking ships in exchange for one loss.

Capabilities, Plans, and Intentions

The Fleets

We are, of course, well-suited to war against Austria-Hungary. They’re a weak power, with a small budget of around 60% of France’s. our six battleships are, on average, newer than theirs, although most of their battleships outgun ours—only the two Austrian 8×13″ ships are inferior. Where French ships beat them handily is speed. Suffren is, at 26 knots, the slowest ship we have in service. The fastest Austrian battleship makes 25 knots. We have five battleships in the Mediterranean. Rouen, recently in mothballs, is operating on trade protection duty in the North Atlantic while her crew comes up to speed. (As I’m sure they will. Rouen holds the current record for battle stars in the French fleet, with seven.)

In aircraft, we’re again superior, with more than twice as many as the Austrians, and the ability to bring nearly as many as the Austrians have to their own home waters. One of our carriers, Bearn, is currently under refit, and will be back in service in seven months. Until then, we just have Liberté and Fraternité, representing a combined aircraft strength of 180 planes.

Trade warfare is where we’re inferior, somewhat. The Austrians have thirty submarines to our eight, and six cruisers to our one. We’re also a bit light on light cruisers right now: we have fourteen of them, but most are tied up overseas on foreign service. There are five in home waters, and two of those are our new Friant class, which are still working up in Europe. (I’ll let them get up to speed before sending them into battle.) The other three are obsolescent Voltaire-class ships, built in the late 1920s.

We’ve flipped things around somewhat on destroyers. Our most recent ships are faster, heavier, and better-equipped than their Austrian equivalents.

Things get a little spicier if Italy decides to join in. They’re quite close to us in overall strength, and adding them to Austria would put us on the back foot. Happily, we’re more or less immune to blockades from Austria and Italy—they have no bases in our build zone, so they can’t sustain a large fleet there. Since we have more bases in the Mediterranean than we do even in Northern Europe, we’re perfectly capable of blockading Austria forever. (Not Italy, though. They’re too strong.)

Shipbuilding

Besides the aforementioned Bearn, still in refit, we have seven ships in the yards. We’ll start with three new Arc-class destroyers, which are approximately equal to the most recent Austrian ships but inferior to both sides’ top-line options.

Next are two 90-plane Liberté-class carriers, Egalité (to round out the revolutionary trio) and Terreur (I ran out of positive-sounding French Revolutionary names). At 35,000 tons, they’re the envy of the world, nearly twice as large as most other powers’ largest ships. (Of couse, that does mean it’s a disaster if one of them gets sunk by, say, an Austrian submarine. Knock on wood.)

Finally, we have two more Friant-class light cruisers, 9,400-ton ships with large batteries of dual-purpose guns: 12 5″ and 20 3″. They also carry mines and torpedoes, but no aircraft. (Nowhere to put them, with all the guns.) Given that our carriers are large, losing the scout planes is no great drawback, especially since most of our battleships carry them now.

War Plans

Pretty straightforward here. Our goals are as before: take Morocco as soon as possible, so that the plot of Casablanca can take place on schedule. An invasion is already being planned.

As far as battles go, we can outmuscle the Austrians in most fights. Battleship actions are a bit iffy, however, given the ship-for-ship Austrian superiority, as are cruiser actions, where we’re badly outnumbered.

On the other hand, I’m absolutely going to take a chance on any battle where there are carriers involved, provided it doesn’t take place in the depths of the Adriatic. Anywhere else in the Mediterranean, we have a massive advantage in our land-based aircraft.

If there’s anything I ought to do differently, now’s the time to mention it.

TO&E: Austere Companies

Posted by parvusimperator

There’s an exercise that exists to get one to challenge one’s own assumptions by imposing a very difficult condition on a problem so one sees what tradeoffs come out. Let’s play with an example. Inspired by the interview with former General der Panzertruppe Hermann Balck, let’s give this sort of problem a try.

The criteria in question is that rifle companies shouldn’t number more than 70-80 men. Let’s firm this up a bit and call it a hard limit of 80 men. Arbitrarily choosing mechanized infantry as our guinea pigs, what would an 80 man mechanized infantry company look like?

Let’s start by thinking about our vehicle. Balck also postulated a 10-tank company, with 3-tanks per platoon. Let’s assume our mechanized infantry company mirrors this structure, which is pretty reasonable. We have a few simple options depending on how we want to operate our IFVs:

Keep a crew of 3 men in the IFVs during mounted and dismounted operations. Have five dismounts in two of the IFVs in the platoon and six dismounts in the third, giving us two eight-man dismount squads. There are, of course, a few other ways to think about this problem, but that’s a pretty standard one.
Have a crew of 3 men in the IFVs during mounted operations and a crew of two men in the IFVs during dismounted operations. Have five other dismounts per IFV, giving us two nine man squads (or three six-man squads if you prefer). Having two crew in the IFV is suboptimal but doable. We could also look into extra automation, but that brings up our next option:
Have a crew of 2 men in the IFVs during mounted and dismounted operations. This gives six dismounts per IFV. Two-man crews might be as effective as three man crews given modern technological aids. Certainly the US Army wants a two-man crew for the OMFV.

My preference is for #3. I’ve read enough good test data to justify the design,¹ and we’re going to want plenty of optics on our IFV anyway.

We could also consider variations that would give us two ten-man dismount squads if we preferred, but I’ll stick with those classic US Army nine-man dismount squads, that could also be reconfigured (either ad-hoc or doctrinally) into three six-man squads. That gives each platoon a total manning of 24. We’ll postulate that one of the IFVs is commanded by the platoon leader (a lieutenant), and the platoon sergeant will command another IFV or one of the squads. So we’ll have one officer and 23 enlisted personnel in our platoon.

Three platoons gives me 72 men total. Not bad so far. All we need is a company HQ. CO, XO, First Sergeant are pretty obvious. We’ll also add a supply sergeant, and we’ll stipulate that the HQ has one IFV and probably a truck. So, that’s four men in the HQ, and 76 men altogether. Done.

That was a little less hard than I thought it would be, so let’s look at those squads. As mentioned before, we can use a ‘split squad’ method to give us two 9-man squads in the pattern of the US Army. And, while the US Army has made this work, I’ve never quite been a fan of splitting squads across vehicles. Our other obvious choice is to use each six-man dismount team independently as squads. Let’s unpack that a little.

There are a bunch of ways to work with a six-man squad, but I like having a squad being able to fire and maneuver, and I like symmetrical teams, which gives us a six-man squad comprised of two three-man teams. Which should function like four-man teams, except with less ability to absorb casualties. Or so the theory goes; that was the stated reason for the marines to switch from three to four men per fireteam in the 1940s. Three men in the fireteam does mean that we’re low on riflemen, especially if we add grenadiers. We could make the teams asymmetrical, but that makes the command burden harder, and per Balck, the whole point of this was to make command burden easier.

Looking at the other configuration, two dismount squads of nine men each in a mechanized platoon has been tried before in the US Army and they found it unsatisfactory. Specifically, they didn’t like the lack of infantry, and they revised the platoon in the early 2000s to have three dismount squads of nine men each in the same four Bradley platoon, and there haven’t been much in the way of complaints about that after the Iraq war. Certainly, there are no calls to change it.

And, unlike the 10-tank company that Balck also proposed, no one has put forward a formal organization for an infantry company that’s this small. Likely because it’s pretty bare bones, and when one adds casualties, transfers, absences for leave, training assignments, and the like, the platoon never starts at full strength. It should be noted that, while on paper the US Army’s mechanized infantry platoon consists of 1 officer and 38 men, plus a few attachments, and there are only 36 seats in four Bradleys, veterans in Operation Iraqi Freedom never reported having a problem finding seats for everyone in the platoon.

Yes, I know Chieftain doesn’t like it. He’s entitled to his opinion. I disagree with him based on test data showing it works that goes back to the early 90s. All successful. ↩