State of the CTone Address

I'm alive.  Sorry I haven't been by anyone's blog in a week or so; life has me tied up right now and it's going to be weird for a little while longer.  Work has me commuting through DC traffic aaaaaaand Baltimore traffic, so I'm averaging six to seven hours in the car on top of a nineish hour workday.  If you see a shaved head dude screaming his head off in traffic, red faced with spit flying out, that's me, and it's best to leave me to my grievance and not make eye contact.

Some great news is I've found a place to live for the time being that's perfect perfect perfect in every way.  God has a way with coming through at the 11th hour with perfect solutions, and He doesn't disappoint.  There's not much to say about it other than it's close to where I am now and my kids better get used to playing outside -- it's about time for that.  Yo Gabba Gabba can take a hike.  To give you an indicator of how perfect this place is, this is me in the back yard several years ago:


My reloading addiction is about to go full tilt!  The local critters better polish up on their camouflage too; there haven't been any coyotes seen there in awhile, but I'm certainly going to find out if there are any within calling range.

I haven't had time to anything with the 338wm project, but I did get to fire my new AR upper.  It's going to need a little tweaking in the rail system, but I think it's going to be good to go.  I had many stoppages within the first twenty rounds or so -- bolt overrides, double feeds, bolt not locking back -- but the bolt was almost completely dry, and with some 10w-40 it was running like a sewing machine.  I did manage to ruin both of the Nevco steel plates; I knew better than to shoot them inside of 100 yards, but they were irresistable and I didn't have much cardboard handy.  I'll eat them up with the 338wm at distance when I get that up and running, and pick up two more for handgunnery.

I'll stop by and say hi when I can.  I hope everyone is having a smashing time with life right now!

That's not a gun. This is a GUN!!!

Known on US Navy ships as the Close In Weapon System, or CIWS (or Phalanx), in Iraq somebody had the totally awesome idea to mobilize them and use them at ground facilities for. . . . . wait for it. . . . shooting down rockets and mortars!  Wicked!!  This version is goes by the much cooler name of Counter Rocket, Artillery, and Mortar, or C-RAM.  Other countries have 30mm and 40mm versions, but the US CIWS/C-RAM is a 20mm gun.


Rate of fire for the latest system is reportedly 4,500 rounds per minute, and doing the math shows that to equate to 75 rounds per second!  That's nasty.  I guess it has to be to be able to shoot football sized objects down from several miles away while they're traveling at 3,000+ feet per second.  I didn't have this system where I was at, so all incoming rounds just landed wherever, but I would have been glad to have this beast shooting stuff down.  Now I wonder how much each round costs so that I can calculate how much a four second burst costs.

ETA:  And another one that shows thermal imaging where you can see the actual mortar taking hits and blowing up from the 20mm rounds. 

This one's even better!



ETA:  All right, so apparently this concept is way more high tech than the CIWS/C-RAM system.  The Germans have a 35mm "Revolver" that is way cool at shooting down incoming threats.  Hang in there towards the end of the video to see what the rounds do to missiles and such.  Awesome!

For the AR geek

M4 flash suppressor shot glasses.  This is what you get for the man who has it all!

A waste of perfectly good armor

Pictures from an abandoned Ukrainian armor repair depot.  That's a bunch of tanks, and one can only imagine how many other abandoned facilities there are out there.

Cooooool.

Firearm training for women

For ladies who are interested in taking some firearm training, go to A Girl and Her Gun for a chance to win funds and ammo towards a shooting academy in the US.  Awesome!

A bit bulky for combat, but whatever

A .454 Casull with 30mm under-barrel grenade launcher.  Might be good for stopping bears.

Myth busted

I've often heard that big ol' honkin sedans from the 50s through the 70s are far safer than the plastic fantastic cars of today because the oldies have so much metal in them and will withstand a collision much better.  My gut feeling from seeing piles of multi-car accidents in this day and age where everybody comes out unscathed tends to disagree with that statement, and without even looking I find some evidence to support my gut: lots of slow motion footage of a 59 Bel Air hitting a 09 Malibu head on.

One of those crash test dummies took a direct hit to the dome-piece by the steering column which would surely have been fatal to a flesh-and-blood driver, and the other dummy looks like he would have made it out okay had he been real.  I'll stick with modern safety standards, thank you very much!

200 miles from nowhere

A sad but neat story about RAF Flight Sergeant Denis Copping who went Missing In Action in 1942 who apparently crashed his P-40 Kittyhawk in the Sahara, 200 miles from the nearest town.  It's deducted that his fate was wandering off into the desert until it claimed him, which is brutal.  There are excellent pictures of the aircraft at the link.

Found at Ace of Spades HQ

Won't BUFF out

Old NFO has a couple of videos and some information of the B-52 doing its thing.  I've always been in awe of this aircraft not only for its longevity, but also the massive payload the thing can deliver.  Whereas a F-16 can carry up to a dozen MK82 bombs, the B-52 can carry over 50, which is a whole lot of hurt to be delivered on target.  To give you an idea, here is 9 JDAMs being dropped at one time.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Well then, I have a priceless treasure for you.  I'm a big fan of the Chive, so you'll see these posts every now and then.  Looking at these pics, when you get to number 31, you should have an idea of the environment the Marine Corps M16A4 has to operate in, and why the "sand tests" you see internet fanbois putting their M4geries through don't reflect reality.  Also, pic #52 shows the terrifying M1 Garand Assault Clip that you hear so much about.  Lastly, for the martial artists in the room, the GIF from #22 in this pic thread shows the devastation that a kick can do when it connects properly.  I can't stop watching it; it's like a train wreck.

It can only be JAREhhh. .eh. . UPITER!!

A man hand forges his own wedding ring from a meteorite.  I guess when you're rockin' the space metal, there's no need for a tinfoil hat.  Cooooool!

It's gonna happen! Cooooooool!!

Awhile back I noted the thread concerning the idea of what would happen if a Marine Expeditionary Unit went back in time and took on the Roman Empire.  I still stand firmly on the idea that it would be over within a few days if the Marines focused on taking out senior leadership and not trying to kill each and every Roman Soldier. 

Well, as it turns out there's a movie in the works on this very scenario.  I really hope they don't make it suck.  My guess is it'll be geared towards the viewing pleasure of the audience and less towards what would actually happen, which means there will be a scene or three where the Marines try to hold a line and fire rifles into the full mass of Romans, and not much in the way of a couple of forward observers annihilating the Romans with an artillery strike or two.  The latter is the tactic that would be chosen if this became a really real reality, to be followed up with a nightime raid by a few good Marines ricky-reconning into the bed chambers of the Roman Emperor and other leaders and killing them softly with Ka-Bars and suppressed rifles.

It's all in good fun, regardless!

Okay, this might qualify as a "high capacity" magazine

Browsing the latest wares on ARFCOM's USSOF thread (that's US Special Operations Forces), I found this pic of a MK48 fed by a MK19 ammo can and feed belt that's welded to the frame of a rucksack:



Who really neeeeeeeeds that many rounds of ammunition? That's just begging for J. Q. Public to buy for like $12 from a gunshow (or make in their basement) and use to terrorize places of peace and tranquility! Why are y'all laughing?

Ultra high velocity

And how do I get me some of it?

It turns out that tearing through the atmosphere at 20 times the speed of sound is bad for the skin, even if you're a super high-tech aircraft developed by the government's best engineers at its far-out research agency.

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, has made public its best guess about what might have caused its unmanned arrowhead-shaped Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (HTV-2) to suddenly lose contact and crash in the Pacific just a few minutes after slicing through the sky at Mach 20 last August: it was going so fast its skin peeled off.

Hmmm. . . .must not have had a J-4 copper jacket.  Thinking about it, most rifle cartridges struggle to break the Mach 3 barrier, and they're saying this classified flying thingy was going almost seven times that fast!  And that's only what DARPA will publically admit to!  Fantastic.  Now, how do we get this technology to Hornady?  I think it would be great to not have to dial in elevation on my scope to blast a doe at 3,698 yards.

"Nothing like that anywhere in the world"

He's very right -- this is from an episode of Epic Drives where they take a ZR1 Corvette to 200 mph on the Autobahn. Nowhere on earth is there a place that I'm aware of where you can casually drive topped out in a high end sports car for miles and miles without a worry in the world. Several years ago I was cruising as a passenger in a BMW M3 with a friend on our way to Zurich, and he kept the car safely pegged at 155 mph for nearly an hour; the only concern we had was keeping an eye out for faster traffic, as 190 mph Porsches are as abundant in Germany as Civics are here, and I saw one Ferrari F40 and several assorted Lamborghinis drive by in downtown Mannheim. And unlike here in America, "regular" traffic stays to the right for the most part, so there's not miles of cars backed up in the passing lane.

"Ohhh. . . . I was almost there!"

In a 630 horse Corvette, I would have been!!


***ETA: I just clicked through some of my Germany pics and found this one of a Testarosa that drove by in Mannheim:



I remember hearing it from far off like a pissed off grizzly bear coming my way, the sound ecoing off the buildings. Also, 4-wheelers are tagged and legal to drive on the street. One morning on the Autobahn outside of Mannheim we were passed by this guy on his quad while he took the exit ramp. . . . we were doing 90 mph in a crappy rental car at the time and he blew right by:




Germany is a way cool place.

Neat article on Infamous Weapons

Half of these I knew about. What I didn't know is that DC's stupid gun laws almost had Jack Ruby's Colt destroyed; the same one he used to smoke Oswald. Weird.

Also from Neatorama: Cheesecake stuffed strawberries! Awesome!

The devil on your shoulder

I received a text yesterday from my brother asking if "any reasons come to mind as to why I shouldn't go buy it [a Walther PPQ]?" Hmmmmmm. . .what to do. . .what to do. What would I do in his situation? Firearms being a major investment and all, and spendy at that, I knew I needed to give this question my complete and total consideration, so I allotted a good .087 microseconds out of my not very busy day to respond in favor of the acquisition of said pistol. I mean, there's no way I was going to give my own flesh and blood bad advice. Truth be told, I had already read lots of forum threads and reviews on the gun and all of them held it in high regard. It's a sexy looking handgun too.



It's virtually the same size as the P30, with a .15" longer barrel. The grip feels a scootch shorter than the P30, but still retains a 15-round magazine capacity.




Holding the gun, there is almost no discernable difference between the feel of the grip between these two pistols. The angle and size are the exact same, with the P30 feeling more scratchy with its texture and the PPQ feeling a little more sticky. I think the PPQ's grip alleviates the main complaint of the P30's: the P30's grip tears and scratches the skin, making you wear an undershirt to prevent it.


The striker fired PPQ has a gorgeous trigger. I agree with the reviews I've read calling it a much improved Glock-like trigger; it has not a lot of takeup before the sear engagement, with a clean and predictable break without much or any overtravel. Reset is short, crisp, and tactile. Since the gun is brand new, there's a touch of grittyness in the takeup, but I've read that that goes away. The takeup is not heavy, but it's not light either like the HK's LEM trigger. I think that Walther did it right with this one.

While my brother was over, I made a trashy holster for it with the sparse materials I had lying around. With the last little piece of .093" kydex I had left, my intent was to make a riveted IWB/OWB holster with belt slides for OWB carry and pull-the-dots for IWB carry, but I didn't have enough material to do it. I ended up turning the abomination into the worst looking AIWB holster I've ever made, with the promise that when my kydex shipment comes in hopefully today or tomorrow I'll make a better one. He still needs to put a gizzilion rounds through it and test out some carry loads anyways, so we have time.



This whole ordeal is not the same as, but not quite unlike buying your spouse a Benelli shotgun or something and then innocently trying to tell her that one day she'll warm up to it, and until then you'll just keep is safe and maintained. My brother has a keen eye and is very informed when it comes to firearms, and putting myself in his shoes told me that I would request his council to give me that last 5% that I needed to commit to a gun purchase in a heartbeat. He wasn't asking because he didn't know if it was a quality piece; he was already writhing on the hook and wanted to see if I would pull him off for any reason. So if you look at it that way, I'm not really an enabler. He did tell me that I need to come over and shoot it most ricky-tick. Oh the things I put up with to appease my brother. . . . !!

Who knew pop videos could be tasteful?

Katy Perry's new music vid leaves out the dancing sluts, doesn't paint the Marine Corps as a bunch of baby killers, and Perry herself doesn't look like she slathered herself in Elmer's Glue and ran around the Hobby Lobby, adorning herself in random shiny things. Some bigshot media exec must have called in sick that day. There's still the weird Horus eye thing near the end though:


I got a kick out of the ARCOM thread on this one, with the Marines picking out the flaws in the video. I say it's a more accurate depiction than anything Hollywood has come out with. Someone showed her how to put cammie face paint on correctly (despite the use of black). Hopefully this is a new trend from the music industry? I doubt it, but whatever.

Pretty women

. . . . .who hunt tasty animals. Awesomeness!

Did you get the feeling that they were compensating for something? I sure didn't. It seemed to me like a group of women who loved to hunt various animals with all sorts of weapons. The giant alligator with a quiver of arrows in its head was hard core, but I think my favorite part was seeing the deer mounts in their cabin with fluffy scarves and such on their necks. Nice touch!

My wife frowns on dead all things dead animal. Years ago when we lived in a small apartment, my wife found a set of antlers that I had mounted on a plaque and brought home to hang on the wall in the spare bedroom. She insists that dead animal mounts are a no-go, but I have high hopes that she'll change her mind one day when I bring home a beautiful hog mount or something. Or maybe a bison. We'll see if she notices.

Sparsely populated, beautiful scenery, low prices

I think I found a big piece of uninhabited land that I'm sure would sell for next to nothing. Here's some pictures taken by a recent visit this past spring.

Is it me, or is it getting all Call-of-Duty up in this piece?