Bureaucracy: a game mechanic idea

Posted by Fishbreath

I’m creeping toward the end of a game of Stellaris, and an incongruity hit me: why am I hiring more bureaucrats to make things in my large empire cheaper, against all reason and every historical example?

Let me explain. In Stellaris, there is a soft cap on the size of your empire: sprawl. Population, production buildings, and territory all generate sprawl. Bureaucrats increase your sprawl cap. If you go over your sprawl cap, things cost more. Ergo, bureaucrats make things cost less, which is facially absurd.

But how do you solve it? I think the answer is that maybe you don’t, or at least not entirely. You just need to measure two things: first, sprawl, which bureaucrats counteract, and second, administrative efficiency. Sprawl works like it does in Stellaris: the more empire there is, the more expensive things get, unless you have administrators to counteract the effect.

Administrative efficiency models the loss of efficiency from thicker red tape. The more administrators you have, the lower your efficiency gets, and the more things cost. Administration is less expensive than a vast kleptocracy, but still expensive compared to a smaller, leaner state.

Of course, that’s just a surface-level implementation. You might tune things so that size of empire and size of administrative state play off of each other, which would let you (imaginary game-designing reader) set a soft cap on effective empire size. Or, if you’re really into the concept that bureaucracy is at best a mixed bag, implement a kind of cost disease.

After a while, the goal of any large organization of humans becomes ‘justify this organization’s continued existence’. Bureaucracies almost never shrink over the long run, absent some outside cataclysm. They’re much more likely, instead, to grow. So, a given unit of bureaucracy is created to administer a given amount of stuff. The amount of stuff per unit bureaucracy never goes up, but the administrative cost of each unit of bureaucracy does.

Which brings us to the final form of the idea. When your empire expands, it needs bureaucrats. When you hire bureaucrats, you introduce a slowly-growing ossification into the structure of your empire. Eventually, your bureaucrats cut into your ability to do productive things, taking up more and more of your output until your empire is paralyzed by the cost of running itself, and eventually torn down by forces without.

This neatly mirrors some real-world trajectories. Depending on how you tune things (capping the penalty one bureaucrat imposes, tweaking the rate at which the penalty grows) it’s probably possible to set up an empire that can survive in a sort of semi-stasis, handicapped but not quite self-destructing. It opens the door to a wide variety of empire traits and events (moral, dutiful bureaucrats who aren’t as bad in the long run, bursts of patriotic fervor in e.g. a war temporarily reversing the downward trend, and so forth) to boot.

Anyway, I’m not working on anything in the 4X/empire-builder genre, so if you like it, take it. I’d love to play a game which leans into this idea.

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

Posted by Fishbreath

And we’re at issue #100!

I’ll level with you: I didn’t end up doing anything special (although maybe I will as the year winds down). I’ve been consumed instead with a fabrication project that will definitely yield an article or two on the process, and will hopefully yield a few articles on the underlying reason for the project over the next year.

That cryptic statement aside, here’s the news.

Defense

Mathematical history: modeling the Luftwaffe’s chances in the Battle of Britain – I should see if I can get Battle of Britain II working again, avoid the frustrating campaign bugs which make all your AARs and data useless, and game it out. Well, first I should finish the Rule the Waves 2 playthrough, but that’s on my desktop computer, which is in a room I’m slowly painting.
Test-flying the world’s most advanced F-15 – That’s the one for the Qataris, so presumably they’re not counting any future designs.
Laser weapons: sci-fi ten years ago, commonplace now – How did it happen? Read on, find out.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, father of Iran’s nuclear bomb ambitions, assassinated – Was it Israel? Probably.
The weapon? A remote-controlled machine gun mounted to a car, which shot up Fakhrizadeh’s vehicle, then exploded when the job was done

Science and Technology

AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine data is not up to snuff – They did do all the testing they say they did, but they also did some no-nos in reporting it—using certain subgroups of the trial participants, combining unlike tests, and so on.
The mechanism of COVID destroying your sense of smell
Anecdata: Amazon reviews of scented candles have fallen one full star since the start of the pandemic – “This candle doesn’t smell like anything!”
DeepMind attacks another intractable problem, this one more practical than ‘beat the world’s best Go players’: protein folding! – Maybe next they’ll tackle predicting plasma instabilities in tokamaks, and 2020 will be the start of the Fusion Age.
Lessons from 20 years of Linux kernel work – “Don’t annoy your users.” Also, APIs are tricky to design, because you don’t know if they’re good until people start using them, and you can’t change them after people start using them.
It’s going to take LockMart a year to replace a failed power unit in the Orion capsule earmarked for Artemis I – If I were king and could make a race happen, I’d lay approximately even odds on SpaceX soft-landing something on the moon before LockMart can tear their capsule down and put it back together.
Arecibo’s instrument platform has collapsed – R.I.P. (radiotelescope in pieces).
As always, it needs a big IN MICE disclaimer, but scientists have reversed age-related vision loss in mice – Via epigenetic programming, or in essence telling the old mice to sort themselves out.
The best measurement yet of the fine structure construct – IN MICE! … No, just kidding.

Guns

My new favorite cartridge on the basis of name is the .22 Eargesplitten Loudenboomer

Grab Bag

The adventures of a Brooklyn beekeeper

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Nov. 25, 2020)

Posted by Fishbreath

Issue #99! Thank you for following along for the two-ish years we’ve been sharing what passes for our reading list. I’ll maybe try to do something big for the next one of these—going back and finding predictions might be fun.

Books

I’m in the middle of Brian Enos Practical Shooting Beyond Fundamentals, and finding it useful. He’s gotten past the Zen-iest bits at the beginning, and some of his notes on grip and sight focus have stuck with me. Hopefully they pay off at the range.
Parvusimperator is probably reading things too.

Defense

What we’re selling to the UAE, in the brief period between now and when US Middle East policy goes back to ‘what failed novelists in the early 2010s though would be cool’ – F35s, Reapers, and an awful lot of air-launched munitions.
Canada’s next frigate is a hull wrapped around VLSes – An unspecified number of Sea Ceptors (possibly 24, quad-packed in six midships VLS cells), a 32-tube Tomahawk-length Mk 41, and the increasingly-popular Naval Strike Missile box launchers.
Italy is building effective ships at a pace the US should mimic, if we’re serious about holding the Western line against China in the 21st century: Salamander – In a quiet, workmanlike fashion, the Italians are over there building good ships.
China to build An-225s – I think, in an older post where I planned some Luchtbourgish air landing forces, I worked out that an An-225 can plausibly fit six BMP-3s.
A patent on non-explosive reactive armor – It’s basically rocket fuel.
Nagorno-Karabakh War 2020 ends: Azerbaijan wins – The big takeaway? The vulnerability of ground forces to loitering munitions and drones. Also, that sentence (… fragment) is very nearly word-for-word ripped from a book of War in the Future™ sci-fi I had as a teenager.
Photos: a B-1 carries a JSOW externally

Science and Technology

We might get a negative leap second – This will, of course, blow up a large amount of computer timekeeping infrastructure, because we computer people didn’t think of that.
Arecibo radio observatory to be decommissioned – Sad to lose an awesome piece of engineering as well as a big radio observatory, but Arecibo was also the biggest active radar dish in the world too, which will leave us still more vulnerable to alien invasion.
There are now three COVID vaccines in the home stretch. AstraZeneca’s, which is (probably; sample sizes are awful small) less effective than the first two candidates to pull out of the final corner, is also substantially cheaper ($3 per dose against $20+) and requires no more cold storage than a minifridge, and AstraZeneca says they can manufacture about 1.5 billion double-dose courses in 2021, against a few hundred million of the others.

History

The truth behind the Rolls Royce vs. Packard-build Merlin debate – The story, as ever, is slightly more complicated than the ‘Packard laughs at Rolls-Royce, saying, the design is too hand-fit to work in a factory’ version I have hitherto been fond of telling.
The AGM-122 Sidearm – It’s a hoot in the DCS Harrier.

Grab Bag

Violence in Minneapolis surges; cops quit en masse – Whaaaaaaa? Whoever could have predicted this?
Bengals QB Joe Burrow blows out a knee – The poor guy. The Bengals did not do a great job keeping him safe.
America’s invisible pot addicts – This is one of those places where a clearly bad policy (aggressive enforcement against a relatively harmless drug) yielded whiplash to an opposite but also bad policy (pot everywhere!).
China’s one-child policy: a brief history – Also, a tragic history, ultimately.
Ever wanted to play a game of H. G. Wells’ classic Little Wars, but balked at spending a factory Glock’s worth of your hard-earned money on antique toy cannon? Well, I’m working on a 3D-printed option.

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Nov. 11, 2020)

Posted by Fishbreath

I’m a few weeks late in mentioning this, but Parvusimperator no longer works in the office next to me. He’s moved on to greener pastures; he requested I not say exactly where, but I will remark that you’d recognize the name.

Defense

Armenia loses – Azerbaijan’s ties to Turkey, with its F-16s and native drones, proved too much to overcome. It is also another indictment of the West; after Armenia spent a lot of effort escaping the orbit of Russia, Europe and the US did exactly nothing in terms of material aid. Expect some soul-searching in that part of the world, and some wondering whether co-religionists in Russia will be better allies than democracies in Europe.
On a lighter note, the tank alignment chart – I think I am an Or Purist—as long as it’s in one of the pure columns, I think ‘tank’ is appropriate.
Taiwanese citizens panic on news of Biden’s election – Say what you like about Trump, but his first term featured some big successes in the foreign policy realm that a Biden administration is not likely to continue.
Big Army officially selects the SM-6 as its Mid-Range Capability missile – It seems like a slightly odd choice for a ground-to-ground missile, but two thumbs up for buying something already in service.
Northrop Grumman to replace the Reaper with something stealthy and autonomous – Fun. Reaper would have been a good name for a stealthy second-generation drone, but alas, it’s already taken.
Video of the week: Hellfire seekers searching
Biden to start war with Brazil? – A tongue-in-cheek summation of a rumor that a Biden administration will name certain countries ‘climate outlaws’.
Moltke’s Matrix of Officer Attributes – It generalizes well to other fields, too.

Science and Technology

Spanish scientists in China are making promising … human-money chimeras?! – For the love of God, China, crack down on this sort of thing! What good is it being a bunch of commie dictators if you aren’t going to use that power?

Guns

A USPSA range officer died after a competitor dropped a gun, which went off on striking the ground.
It was a Shadow 2, which was dropped on the hammer; here’s a test of a similar scenario – There are two kinds of dropped-gun discharges: the hammer-strike ones like this, and inertia-related ones, where the change in velocity on hitting the ground either trips a sear (a la recent P320 troubles), or drives a floating firing pin into the primer against spring tension (usually only with lighter firing pin springs, extended firing pins, or both).
Here’s an eleven-page thread on the Enos forums about same
Here are some examples of other dropped-gun discharges from Tactical Life

Grab Bag

Stock exchanges relocating to Texas? – Data centers, at least; New Jersey (where the data centers are based now) wants to implement a one-cent financial transaction tax.
The New York Times has always been a liberal rag with purported good intentions, but now the second half is going away
On Big Tech censorship – That’s why we’re (largely) independent of Big Tech here at the Soapbox.
On the collapse of empires – A chilling vision of things to come, to quote Kent Brockman. Morlock is one of those folks who I don’t always agree with, but who always makes me think (like Putin, to my SPBGU professors circa 2010). Unusually for that crowd, he comes at me from the neoreactionary direction, rather than the center-left one. Anyway, go for the chilling vision of things to come, stay for the astrophysics metaphors.

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Nov. 4, 2020)

Posted by Fishbreath

If you’re the kind of person who looks at the URL bar, you might have noticed we went from a URL ending in 95 to one ending in 95-2 to one ending in 97. Getting real close to that centennial now.

Defense

492nd Fighter Squadron has some fun with nose art for Halloween – Yes, it’s been a little bit since we did a What We’re Reading.
Pour one out for HMS Bristol, the Royal Navy’s biggest surface combatant – I think, at least.
Inside the Special Boat Service, or at least as far inside as The Drive can get
Japanese F-35s train with USS America – Japan’s F-35As, however, not their Bravos. That would be a bit too on the nose, having American F-35Bs fly off of their not-carriers, and flying their own off of our pseudo-carriers.
Integrating AI into tanks: ATLAS and how it works – Kind of like a batman. “I say, Jeeves, what would you recommend for that T-80?” “Why, sabot, I should think, sir.” “Jolly good.”

Games

Lawsuit claims EA’s loot boxes are an illegal gambling system – Alas, only under the laws of Canada.

Science and Technology

Inertia demonstrated by dust on a tennis racket – High-speed cameras are the best.
The Starlink Terms of Service require you to recognize that Mars is a free planet and that Earth-based governments have no authority or sovereignty over Martian affairs – Baller move.
The Starlink terms of service are attached to the Starlink public beta, which provides service comparable to low-tier fiber at a slight premium – Suddenly, living in the country and working remotely is a whole lot easier. Except when it rains.
Right to repair: a rare gleam of bipartisan agreement – It’s not left vs. right, it’s the people vs. the cyberpunk megacorps.
A funeral for Google Play Music – Guess it’s time to get that lifetime Plex Pass so I can host a lesser service myself.
Weirdo bubblehead slang – There’s a lot of it.
What it’s like to be locked out of your Google account – I really ought to run some preparedness drills and make sure there’s nothing in my Google account that I can’t get at some other way.

Guns

Glock 26 Grandmaster Tony Wong speaks – He’s a very unusual character, the epitome of ‘the gun doesn’t matter’, and probably not giving super-useful advice in the same way that Usain Bolt probably isn’t going to be able to teach the average joe how to run that fast. Talent matters.
Kimber flees North Cuomostan for greener pastures – Troy, AL.
Shooting drill of the week: The Challenge

Grab Bag

Sidewalk vaults and true obsolescence – I shared this story instead of the one about the New Yorker who fell through a sidewalk into an abyss of rats.
COVID was great for the Cannonball Run – What a story this is.

Decision 2020

There is, at the time of writing, still an election on.
Class in America is divided by this question: do you shower before work, or after?

Fishbreath Competes: 2020 USPSA Roundup

Posted by Fishbreath

It’s the end of October, and that means it’s the end of the Western Pennsylvania USPSA season. How did it go?

Generally

I started shooting in Revolver division this year. I’m happy with my choice; my inkling I would enjoy playing the modern cowboy¹ proved to be correct.

There are other articles here that explain in depth why I find Revolver fascinating, but I have a few further thoughts on the division after a year of shooting it.

First: it’s punishingly difficult sometimes, especially at local matches where the rule about how a single position can’t require more than 8 rounds is a little more loosely applied. The development of competition firearms pretty clearly states that nobody shoots a long, relatively heavy double-action trigger by choice. Getting my hits is not nearly as easy as it was with a red dot, and an eight-round capacity means that I don’t have nearly as much opportunity for makeup shots as I was used to with previous guns. Of course, I see that as a good thing. I was getting sloppy with my more race-y guns.

Second: it’s even more of a brain game than I expected. I’ve heard people slam the lo-cap divisions as just reloading whenever you move. That’s often the case, but not always, and I find that I have to spend a whole lot more thought on how to slice up a stage, and how to move through it efficiently, than I ever did with Carry Optics or Limited. The LCSA October match had a fair bit of this, although it’s not a great performance by any means.

Third: the heat isn’t quite as far and away better than me as it is in other divisions, which I suppose means that Revolver, in practice, is a little easier than Carry Optics. I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing. If one of my goals in this sport is to be properly good relative to my peers (and it is), it seems like I could do worse than picking a division where I’m naturally advantaged.

Fourth: it’s a conversation starter! Everyone’s curious about the gun, the gear, and the why. On more than one occasion, I’ve been told, “You make that look really fun,” which is a good compliment.

Fifth: earlier in my Revolver career (so, June), I described the division as wheelgun-specific esoterica layered on top of the very, very basics of the sport. In the last few weeks, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that this is not strictly accurate. For many of the form and technique items I was doing differently than I would with a semi-auto, I’ve swung back toward the semi-auto methods. A grip is a grip, no matter what shape of handgun it’s formed around; a double-action trigger pull is a double-action trigger pull, whether it’s turning a cylinder or not². What I can’t say for sure is whether this is an absolute truth or a ‘local’ one—is it just me, or is it a more broadly-applicable lesson?

Moving on, I’ve started listening to Ben Berry’s Short Course podcast, and although I grant he’s not saying anything especially novel, he approaches the sport in the same way I do and says things that I don’t think I would have hit upon quickly without someone else saying them. Two items in particular are worth calling out. First, the value of live-fire training. I was previously in the camp of, “I’ll do my live-fire practice at matches.” This, of course, is a bad idea. You may burn a lot of ammo at a match, but you’re spending a very short amount of time on any one skill, and you don’t have the time for analysis in between every few shots like you would running drills at a range. Two, how to practice generally. His mantra is that it’s very hard to drill your way to faster times, and that improvement comes much more frequently from doing something different instead of doing it quicker.

There are a bunch of other things too, but I’ll save those for a separate post, since this one’s already 1200 words long and I’m not even close to done yet.

Gear

Everything pretty much worked. I realize that this is a slightly strange thing to say in a season where I was plagued by light primer strikes, but those problems were largely of my own devising. A 10lb hammer spring and Federal primers are a reliable combination. I was trying to get a little too cute, and paid the price for it³.

It took most of the season, but I think I’m pretty well acquainted with the double action trigger on my chosen Ruger Super GP100 now. I have more to say about the gun, but I think it’ll work better as an article unto itself.

Long story short, the gun did its part, except when I was doing ill-advised tinkering. What am I feeding it with? Originally, it was a diet of factory .38 Special. The hotter factory stuff tends just barely to make minor power factor. I had planned to reload from the beginning, since I get all my brass back on handy little clips, and it seems wasteful not to use it, but I was planning on .38 Special. Difficulties with getting moon clips in and out of the gun convinced me to make the switch to .38 Short Colt⁴. Although the exact load is still a work in progress, it ejects from the cylinder more readily (the ejector pushes fired cases fully free of chambers even on a partial stroke) and drops in easier, too (the cases still wiggle in my moon clips, but the magnitude of the displacement at the tips of the bullets is smaller, since the loaded cartridges are shorter). All in all, this is another place where I decided to take my lumps and do the thing everyone’s doing—a painful thing for a hipster like me to admit, but in this case, they’re not wrong. The last thing on my list for easier moon clip dropping is cylinder mouth chamfering, which I’m having done over the offseason.

The last item on the gear list is the belt and associated equipment. I’m still using the same Midway USA two-layer belt I bought for my Limited P-09. It still works just fine. My revolver gear is heavier than my Limited/Carry Optics rig, so I get a little bit more flex, but not so much that I care to change up the belt itself.

Since Revolver is a race division, I might buy parvusimperator’s old Double Alpha jobber. I’ll have to try it and see how I like it first, though. The SpeedBeez Kydex race holster is perfectly functional. I don’t feel like I’m giving up that much time on draws, and the Kydex holster may actually be more forgiving in terms of getting a good draw out of a bad start, because there’s a place where my knuckle hits to tell me if I’m on target.

The SpeedBeez moon clip rack works fine. It’s not adjustable like the Double Alpha individual moon clip holders, but I don’t see any need for adjustment, and Double Alpha claims their magnets hold the moon clips more tightly anyway, which is the last thing I need. The SpeedBeez rack was also about $40 cheaper than the equivalent number of DAA racks. The one downside to the SpeedBeez unit is that it’s curved to fit the front of a body, and since I wear it slightly around to my left side, it doesn’t quite contour perfectly to me. Not enough of a problem to merit a change, though, I don’t think.

Goals (2020)

I didn’t have many explicit goals for 2020, because the season got off to such a strange start with the initial pandemic closures and all. I did sort of develop two goals as we got a bit deeper into the year.

First: maybe make B class? I’ve been languishing in C class for a while across all my divisions, and was trending toward B in Carry Optics last year as I developed further familiarity with the gun⁵. This year is the most seriously I’ve taken the sport by far, and despite having to get used to the revolver, I put in a pair of good classifiers in July and August (73% and 56%). That was a good base to work from, but my my classifiers in September and October have not been up to the same standard, except for last Saturday’s 56%, and so I’m not going to make B this year—especially since the 73% gets bumped from the list-o-recent-scores soon.

Second: shoot two matches a month for the length of the season (this year, it was June to October). This was not, I grant, a particularly hard goal to hit this year, given how much I was itching to get out to matches during the COVID lockdowns. After we started back up, the main obstacle to that schedule was weather, but this was a pleasant enough summer in that respect, except on two occasions: LCSA in July, and the Battle for the North Coast match at the end of August. On both occasions, it rained. For LCSA, I decided to tough it out and get the match in anyway; for Battle for the North Coast, I was already out at a hotel in Ohio, and it would have been a little silly not to shoot the match given that it was free for staff.

Goals (2021)

That was 2020. What’s the story for 2021?

To answer that question, I think I have to ask about goals more generally. What do I want to get out of USPSA in the long run?

Number one: I would like to get good at Revolver. There’s a continuum of acceptability here; the bottom end is M-class (which I think should be attainable even if I don’t have the natural skill to push deeper), and the top end is ‘nationally competitive’, by which I suppose I mean ‘can finish in the top half of a Revolver nationals field’. Dream big, right?

A brief aside before I move on: that’s a performance goal, which I’ve come to dislike. In the short term, it’s much better to have process goals. The only thing process depends on is your own motivation, which is entirely under your control. Process goals need verification to guarantee that the process is working, however, and that’s where the long-term performance goals come in. They don’t have a time horizon, but I can use them to check my progress, and therefore the efficiency of my process.

Long-term goal two: give back to the sport by playing staff at more big matches. This plays into a short-term goal (shoot more major matches). This is not an entirely selfless aim: my shooting budget is relatively limited, so saving $100 to $200 in match fees and most or all of a hotel means I can get to more majors.

Long-term goal three: advance through the RO certifications. CRO for sure. Range master maybe? It might be nice eventually, but the range master page says, “This isn’t just so you get a nice certificate on the wall, it’s so you can work matches on a regular basis,” and I don’t know if I want to make that kind of time commitment to officiating specifically.

Finally, number four: classify in every division. This is obviously not as serious a goal as the rest, and pretty much depends on a) classifier matches and b) guns I can borrow.

Of those four goals, only the first three are more than for kicks, and I can only work on the first two in the near term, given experience/time requirements for higher-level range officer certifications. That leaves two to work on. As the saying goes, a goal without a plan is just a dream, so what’s my 2021 plan to move toward those goals?

Item one: shoot three times a month through the USPSA season, which is about March through October here, with at least one of those three sessions being practice rather than a match. My ammo budget allows for 5,000 rounds next year, which comes to a bit over 600 rounds per month. Given my usual local matches, that means probably about 300 match rounds and 300 practice rounds if I go two-and-one.

Item two: dry fire three nights a week. Right now, I’m on a four nights pace, but I want to leave myself a bit more time to do other things next year, with the expectation that I can fill half an hour with some dry fire on the ostensible off nights if I don’t have other projects calling my name.

Item three: end 2020 with a one-year stockpile of reloading supplies. (And, ideally, load them over the winter.) I have orders in for bullets and primers (somehow, I found a case of 5,000 for a price that doesn’t make me sick), so all I need is to grab a bottle or two of powder from the FLGS one of these days.

Item four: work and shoot two major matches. Three would be nice, but I’d take two. (Or maybe even shoot two on staff day and work one without shooting it.) Gotta get that RO card populated. I’d love to go back to Battle for the North Coast as staff next year, and maybe I’ll see if I can pitch in at the Western PA section match too.

Lastly, item five: take an offseason from about mid-November 2020 to January 2021. That is, no regularly-scheduled dry fire, no belt-on practice. Why? This will help me deprogram any bad habits I’ve developed over the year, and set me up for a fresh start on the season in 2021.

Grokking Reloads

I’m going to wrap up this extraordinarily lengthy post with a quick note on reloading. If you’ve been following my videos, you might have noticed that I switched reload techniques after the first match. One of my most surprising discoveries while working up my wheelgun skills was that there are, to the best of my knowledge, zero written descriptions of the two major competition revolver reload techniques⁶ on the Internet. This coda is an effort to rectify that.

There are two schools, named after the hand which handles the ammunition: the strong hand reload and the weak hand reload.

The weak hand reload, which I tried first, involves opening the cylinder with the strong hand: the thumb hits the cylinder release, and the trigger finger pokes the cylinder open. The weak hand hangs around for a moment to palm the ejector on the way down to the belt. After the empties drop, the strong hand drops the gun to belt level, while the weak hand picks up a moon clip and drops it home.

The strong hand reload, which I settled on later, leaves the gun handling to the weak hand. The strong hand thumbs the cylinder release, while the weak hand shifts up to push the cylinder open with the fingers. (I use the middle finger and ring finger, leaving the index finger on the frame to aid in muzzle control.) While the weak hand brings the gun down to the belt, thumbing the ejector on the way, the strong hand goes for a moon clip and sets it in place.

The weak hand reload’s advantage is that it lets you keep your strong hand in place the whole time: no breaking your grip. The disadvantage is that it’s slower: your weak hand is doing nothing while the strong hand opens the cylinder.

The strong hand reload’s advantages and disadvantages are flipped: it can be faster (and indeed, a certain famed wheelgunner by the name of Miculek prefers it), but you’ll be breaking and re-establishing your grip several times over the course of stage.

For the short-thumbed, such as yours truly, the strong hand reload has a second hidden advantage: the weak hand moving up to the cylinder gives me the opportunity to move my strong hand so that my thumb can actually reach the cylinder release.

For me, match experience suggests the strong hand reload is the right one. I find it much easier to align the moon clip with the cylinder when the former is in my better hand. Too, my experience is that the strong hand reload is much easier to perform when moving in non-optimal directions—not just right to left, but even downrange to uprange. Pointing my thumb in a safe direction leaves open access to the cylinder no matter where I’m moving.

And there you have it. My 2020 season in review. Expect a one-season-in bit on the Super GP100 a little later on in November.

My co-blogger, of course, realized this well before I did. Late last year, I was debating what my next division would be. He wrote ‘Revolver’ on a piece of paper, folded it, and told me to look when I made my final decision. Lo, he was correct. ↩
Reloads are, of course, different. ↩
In a Short Course episode I listened to recently, Mr. Berry made the switch to softer primers after a long struggle with getting CCI primers to go off. He admitted to stubbornly saying, “No, I should be able to get this to work!” Here, I make a similar mea culpa. “Just use the right spring!” ↩
Also, everyone who heard I was shooting a .38/.357 gun said, “You using Short Colts?” It’s a curious little cartridge—about the size of a 9mm, and in its Starline incarnation, capable of withstanding similar pressures. I’m pushing a 158gr bullet with about 3.5gr of Bullseye, which is miles off the top end of the pressure charts for the cartridge in its original 1870s guise, but not all that unusual in the modern era. ↩
I’d been shooting it for two years, although for the first of those two years it was in Limited guise. ↩
It goes beyond that—there’s basically zero learning material out there for competition revolver. On the other hand, the Brian Enos revolver forum is one of the friendliest places on the Internet. They never seem to tire of answering newbie questions. ↩

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Oct. 21, 2020)

Posted by Fishbreath

Disregard the calendar. For the next few minutes, it’s October 21.

Defense

Two weeks into the second Nagorno-Karabakh War – For some reason, I’m reminded of the repeated wars in the Balkans immediately prior to the Great War.
Beretta Defense Systems gets the nod to manufacture the next-gen squad weapon – Go pasta gun guys!
Remember how H und K lost that G36 replacement contract? They aren’t taking it sitting down – HK alleges that CG Haenel infringed patents, and the Germans cancelled the contract after the news dropped.
Growler drivers get their own Top Gun school, except for EW – Don’t get caught nearby with a software-defined radio stick.
BAE offers the Archer wheeled howitzer for Big Army’s next gun system
Fun with loitering munitions – For a value of ‘fun’ that supposes you’re on the right side of them.
Brazil’s F-5s are undoubtedly the most capable Tigers on the planet
Zumwalt fires a missile for… the first time? Really? It took this long?
Prince of Wales springs a leak – A bad’un, flooding an engine compartment to a depth of at least a meter.
Japan to build lithium-ion-powered Soryus – The Drive notes that thermal runaway in a submarine battery pack is a Very Bad Thing.
Patriot battery deploys to regional Texas airport – Evidently, it’s an exercise to train the skills needed to deploy on short notice to new places.
Did an RC-135W fly over Taiwan? USAF plays coy – I’m all for supporting Best China.

Science and Technology

Cigarettes don’t burn in submarines – You’d expect that either parvusimperator or I would have known this already, but we did not.
Another Starlink launch – The fact that SpaceX can launch and recover rockets and is rapidly outpacing the rest of humanity in number of satellites operated isn’t really news anymore, but this one has some really cool photos of a landed booster returning to port.
Phonics is hot again – Good. Reading instruction has long been the subject of educational cargo cultism: “The smart kids don’t sound out every word, they recognize words, so we’ll teach all the kids that way!” Without realizing, of course, that the reason the smart kids can recognize words is because they put in the time sounding out words to the point where they got burned in.
The sun emits gamma rays in inexplicably large quantities – I was going to see if there was a Quanta article on this, before I realized it was a Quanta article.
Fluctuation-induced current from freestanding graphene – It’s the ArXiv preprint of the paper about harvesting energy from graphene. I should have checked if there’s a Quanta article about this.
There isn’t, but here’s one about the room temperature superconductor – Cheating a bit; it is decidedly not room-pressure.

The Rona

The next economic crisis: commercial real estate – For obvious reasons.

History

Tallboy earthquake bomb blows up during defusing attempt – Surprisingly, nobody was hurt, including the divers.
Also, you can watch it blow up – Cooool. Also, a reminder that e.g. DCS gets its bomb hits wrong, in that the visible disturbance lasts a long time. I recall reading something from a Viper pilot in the Bosnian intervention about how a 500lb bomb made a great marker, because the dust column lingered for a useful amount of time.
In 1978, some think tank (probably) suggested a 500,000-ton ‘ultracarrier’ – A cool 26 knots on 400,000 horsepower.
Reagan to Thatcher: “Hey, want in on this cool stealth bomber thing? – The British said ‘no’. We almost got an F-117B out of it, though.

Guns

Why does owning a gun make a judge’s Second Amendment rulings suspect? – Because a large cohort of Americans thinks the right to keep and bear arms is a second-class right. Imagine the same question asked about speech: “Judge Fishbreath has a blog. How can we be sure he’ll rule fairly on speech cases?”
20 minutes of Ruger revolver disassembly to put you to sleep – It was actually extremely helpful for me.

US Politics

Obligatory share of the NY Post’s Biden bombshell – There has been sufficient FUD spread about this story that I no longer feel entirely certain of its meanings or implications, but it’s in the news, at least.
November 3rd is going to last approximately eleven years – PA and Wisconsin both only start to count mail-in and absentee ballots on election day.
JD Vance on government of, by, and for the elite – Which, granted, I’m a member of, at least by most ways you’d care to measure.
Everyone, including Trump, misunderstands Trump voters

Grab Bag

Why do zebras have stripes? – The answer is not, as I would have confidently told you one week ago, camouflage. It’s insect resistance: flies find it hard to land on a striped surface, and Africa is full of little flying things carrying equinocidal diseases.
Door Kickers 2 is still on the way – Door Kickers the First comes with the Genuine Patent Soapbox Seal of Editorial Approval. We’re split 50-50 between hopeful and cynical on the next entry.
Red Bull could quit Formula One – They’re pitching a fit because Mercedes can’t sell them engines (no factory capacity left), they burned their bridges with Renault during the 2018 split, and even Ferrari doesn’t want Ferrari engines right now.
Surprising nobody, Wikipedia has a leftist bias – Just wait until I tell you about universities and the press!

Parvusimperator Opines on the Knight’s Armament LAMG

Posted by parvusimperator

Shortly after I last looked at light machine guns and squad automatic weapons, Ian and Karl got some hands-on time with Knight’s Armament’s Light Assault Machine Gun, or LAMG. Let’s take a look at it.

The LAMG is a result of the continued development of Gene Stoner’s Stoner 86 machine gun design. It sports a number of modern improvements, but they’re all in the same spirit of the original, and Gene Stoner’s design principles. It’s number one claim to fame is a shockingly low weight. It’s a belt fed 5.56mm gun, and it weighs 11.4 lbs unloaded (per Knight’s website at the time I write this). Some other, lighter weights have been listed, so you can cut that down more depending on your configuration. That’s a super lightweight gun for a beltfed. For comparison, the M249 weighs 17 lbs unloaded (per FN’s website at the time I wrote this).

Light weight is the first thing that catches the eye on the spec sheet, but it isn’t the only nice new thing on the LAMG. To keep the gun controllable, there’s a low rate of fire, a long receiver, and a constant-recoil system. This should help the receiver life, since the bolt never slams into the back end. The receiver itself is an aluminum extrusion, which simplifies construction and doesn’t require a ton of rivets or welds to assemble.

Since the rate of fire is low, Knight’s Armament decided to not rip off the MG 42 feed mechanism, unlike the vast majority of modern machine gun makers. That mechanism may be combat proven and a popular choice of homework to copy, but it was originally designed to keep up with the MG 42’s extremely high rate of fire. Knowing that the significantly lower rate of fire of their machine gun was a lot easier for a feed system to work with, Knight’s went with a much simpler feed system that uses a significantly shorter cover. Simpler means fewer parts, which is generally preferable from a weight, manufacturing, and reliability standpoint, and it also allows them to mount a reasonably sized sight rail behind the short feed tray cover. This means optics aren’t on a moving tray cover, so they hold zero better. Also, it means worn hinges and latches don’t affect optics and their zero.

Knight’s Armament has also made quite a bit of provision for suppressed use, having both an available suppressor ready to mount on the gun, as well as a barrel assembly with integrated suppressor. I’m a big fan of general issue suppressors for military applications, so this is very nice to see.

Reliability and durability remain outstanding questions. We know what sort of abuse an M249 can take. We know what the design receiver life is. We can also track down some MRBS numbers. I haven’t been able to find anything like that for the LAMG, which is a damn shame. And in the videos Ian and Karl did, they kept insisting that the LAMG “wasn’t intended for sustained fire.” I wish they had actually gone into that, because I don’t know what that means. The barrel profile looks reasonably heavy. There’s a quick-change mechanism for that barrel. And there’s a belt, usually in a 1-200 round box or soft pack, so there’s plenty of bullets. Silly marketing aside, it hasn’t actually gone through the abuse of some troop trials, so while it’s seen a bunch of development time and money, I’d hesitate to call it “mature,” even if it has gone through a number of revisions.

Speaking of ammunition, the LAMG has no provision to feed from rifle magazines, which is a good thing. Those mechanisms never seem to work right. Plus they add weight and complexity all for the off chance that supply might not be able to get the frontline infantry linked 5.56mm in addition to 5.56mm in magazines. Which ignores all the times that they did, or that they supplied link 7.62mm and magazines of 5.56mm in past wars. Or .30-06 and .30 Carbine, and .45 ACP. We can safely skip the mag feed.

So what do we think? Is the LAMG better than the competition for 5.56mm squad automatic weapons? Yes, yes it is. The weight is pretty crazy. There were IAR entrants that weigh more. The LAMG loaded with a 200 round belt weighs about as much as an M249 unloaded, and that’s pretty significant weight savings. I’m a big fan of general-issue suppressors, and the LAMG can be readily configured to run with a suppressor and a suppressor-friendly gas system so the weapon doesn’t wear more or become less reliable over time from the extra pressure. And the constant recoil system makes it super controllable, even when fired from the shoulder. We’re willing to take a chance and deal with having to work out a few bugs to deal with a better machine gun.

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Oct. 14, 2020)

Posted by Fishbreath

Short one this week.

Defense

Tico heads to the scrappers
Is a Biden win a win for China? – This guy says ‘yes’.
Speaking of China, they have a new rifle! – It has one of those foregrip-bipods, at least in the press photo.
1,000 miles in ten minutes: the Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon – Speedy. (The article gives its speed in Mach first, but I’ve always hated Mach number speed measurement without an altitude to go with it.) ARRW, or ‘Arrow’. You know, American military procurement people, if you want to call a missile the Arrow, you can just call it Arrow. You don’t need an acronym. Ask the British about BRIMSTO—I mean, Brimstone.
Friend of a friend: Japan to sell arms to Vietnam

Science and Technology

Security researchers find UEFI malware in the wild – Rootkit alert!

Boogaloo?

Some dudes in Michigan made a really bad plan to kidnap the governor – Want your opsec to be better than theirs? Here’s a primer on codes and encryption.
CityLab: there’s no such thing as a dangerous neighborhood, only dangerous people whose actions are generally constrained to a small geographical area – Headline paraphrased. Sure, I’m making fun of it a bit, but it does pretty clearly show that broadly-targeted gun bans are ineffective at actually reducing crime, and not narrowly tailored to fit the state’s interest in doing so in the first place, so there’s that.

Grab Bag

Japan’s lost generation: 2020 update – Among the entertainments I permit myself to consume is My Hero Academia, and I see some fascinating (intentional?) parallels between that franchise’s villains and some of the descriptions of the generation in question in the article.
Here is a 114-foot, 7400hp yacht… with an 800nm range? – That’s because it was originally the tender for a much larger yacht, in case its owner wanted to pop from Cannes to Corsica for lunch.
October match #1 – It’s a little disappointing after September match #2, but that’s the way it goes in this sport.

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Oct. 7, 2020)

Posted by Fishbreath

It’s late, so the commentary won’t be as inspired as usual.

Update: actually, it’s early, and I forgot to hit publish last night, so here you are.

China

The New York Times never met a Communist dictator whose propaganda they wouldn’t happily publish – Certain US Senators still beyond the pale, as far as I can tell.
Nobody really likes China – Hmmm. I wonder why.

Coronavirus

You’ve heard about R, but what about k? – R is the average number of cases each new case generates. k is a measure of how clustered those cases are. COVID-19 spreads in clustered (it seems).

Defense

Turkey and France face off over Armenia-Azerbaijan
US Navy now shipping a new EW system
Rods from God, the cheap version – That is, a C-17 dropping pallets of (mock) JASSMs.
Macron says Europe should stop buying American arms – And buy French ones, presumably.
India test-fires long-range supersonic anti-sub missile – Parvusimperator and I used this story to gripe about how awful US missile procurement has been over the past three decades.
Haenel MK556 won the G36 replacement contest because it was cheap – Shocker.
Her Majesty’s Death Ray: the AIM-9L in the Falklands! – Fun fact from within: some of the Sea Harrier pilots in the task force had fewer than ten hours in that jet’s cockpit prior to the fight. Ten hours into a DCS module and I can barely even start the thing reliably.

Science and Technology

Physicists build circuit that generates electricity from graphene – That is, from the thermal motion of graphene at room temperature. They seem to have sussed out a way to make the thermodynamics work out. I wish the article said something about what kind of voltages they’re generating—how far away are we from, say, a useful sensor-with-BLE chip that lasts forever? Because that would be handy.
Airbus and the hydrogen-fueled airliner of the future – Parvusimperator’s jokes about exploding airlines aside, it seems to me that some kind of liquid fuel is going to be required for aviation until such time as we start flying fusion jets around. Synthetic Jet-A seems more likely to me, though.
Otto Aviation reveals the Celera 500L – Thanks to laminar flow, it gets similar fuel mileage to my car, and cruises at 460 miles per hour on (coincidentally) 460 cruise horsepower out of a 6.3L turbodiesel.

Sport

Honda to quit F1 – It’s not the first time Honda’s quit F1 after not doing as well as they would have hoped.
In Japan, they can’t do IPSC because nobody’s allowed to have guns, but they can do IPSC Action Air – This guy subscribed to me on Youtube, and I find the idea of a competitive shooting community in Japan oddly fascinating for some reason. The guy in the linked clip is shooting an Open gun, compensator and everything. Even without the compensator, I bet it would shoot just as flat.
Speaking of match videos, here’s one of mine – With third-person footage and full-fat, non-airgun bullets¹.

Grab Bag

Which US states are poorer than the UK, in terms of GDP per capita? – South Carolina, Idaho, and Mississippi. That’s all. I wouldn’t have guessed, and GDP per capita doesn’t even account for tax burden.

I should emphasize that I’m not making fun of the Action Air guys. I think it’s cool that they have the option to at least shoot something, and airguns aren’t useless as training aids either. Tatsuya Sakai won the 2004 Steel Challenge championship practicing mostly with an airgun. He came to the US a month early to work up his real-gun skills and beat KC Eusebio by about six tenths of a second. ↩