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Scheiss Meister

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by Scheiss Meister

  1. KC and The Sunshine Band is the result of some sadistic idiots getting together and asking "How can we make the worst, most banal music? I mean, disco is bad, but maybe we can make it worse?"
  2. It's designed to sacrifice a wheel but protect the crew and cargo when it hits a mine. Granted, there are large enough mines/IEDs or shaped charge mines that can overcome the armor, but in general it will keep the humans inside alive and in shape to continue the fight.
  3. Patriot Games has one of the best opening sentences of any book that I have read: "Ryan was nearly killed twice in half an hour." Then it gets down to business.
  4. Russia's not going to try to replace them in kind. They will be replaced, to the extent possible, with more modern systems. The question is: can Russia replace them quickly enough to matter? Hopefully not, but they've been more able to manufacture new missiles than we thought. That's why we need to continue to provide more modern equipment to Ukraine.
  5. That's some top notch trolling right there.
  6. My son explained this perfectly with his definition of tradition: peer pressure from dead people.
  7. Dude, they're aggy. They love to be fooled.
  8. Oh HELL yes it happened to me and yes, I pissed my pants. When we first changed from the M-2 to the M-224 60mm mortars our armorers decided that they wanted to shoot a 60, so they grabbed a new-in-box gun and set it up. Dumbasses didn't clean it first, so the barrel was full of cosmoline. As I said elsewhere, we used WP rounds (with an effective kill radius of 100 meters) to set the base plates, so they dropped a WP round to set the plate. It made a weird sucking sound and dropped about 15 meters in front of the gun, which was also about 40 meters from me and 45 from where the ammo was stacked. Of course it didn't go far enough to arm, so it didn't go off, but how much do you trust the lowest bidder? It looked remarkably like the example in the video. More to @atomheartbevo's point, I saw quite a few 60mm mortar rounds and LAAW rounds that fell less than halfway to their targets due to malfunctions in the propellant charges. Thank God for functioning safeties.
  9. My daughter in Eugene was pretty bummed about the clouds, but did get a pretty decent picture before maximum.
  10. Maximum here near Navasota through a colander. It's not as neat as the shadows through the trees, but pretty cool, still. It's not completely focused because my wife is short.
  11. The light going through my wife's hat brim.
  12. I was setting up to try to focus on a book cover with my readers and got this by accident. Blurry, but it is going through my head.
  13. I used my reading glasses to focus the partial eclipse in August 2017 onto the sidewalk. It was pretty cool.
  14. So you're telling me that Taco Bell hasn't shut down in Russia?
  15. It's been many years since I dealt with it, but a quick search shows that there are three smoke rounds available for NATO/US tube artillery: HC, WP smoke, and WP incendiary. These are for use in 155mm guns. I know that the WP rounds for 60mm and 81mm mortars are incendiary rounds that don't produce much smoke. Well, aside from the smoke from the fires they start.
  16. It can be used for smoke in a pinch. We never fired that many of them due their propensity to start grass fires. From my memory, which is getting more sieve-like by the day, WP rounds were the heaviest 60mm rounds, so we most frequently used them as the first rounds fired, to set our base plates firmly in the soil. They also make pretty cool mushroom clouds, like micro nukes.
  17. Oh, sure, NOW you tell him.
  18. 44 years for me, so I'm right there with you. The only way that I remember it is because I was a 60mm mortarman, and we had to study the proper application of each type of round.
  19. That's napalm and hyperbaric munitions. Napalm sucks in oxygen from a surprisingly long distance. Hyperbaric munitions spray fuel out into the atmosphere, then a charge ignites the fuel, using the oxygen in the air to burn the fuel. I served with a Vietnam vet who told us about going into tunnels on a hillside that had been napalmed very thoroughly. The bodies within a few feet of entrances and firing ports were horribly burned, but the bodies further in showed few signs of injury. The napalm had sucked the oxygen out of the tunnels. Napalm is very nasty all the way around.
  20. That's thermite, not willie pete. Thermite is a point use incendiary made with aluminum, iron oxide, an ignition source, and binders. Willie pete is an area incendiary consisting of elemental phosphorous, which ignites on contact with air. As the demonstration in basic (mine was on the engine compartment of an old tank, burning through the armor covering the engine, the engine block, and the bottom armor, then several inches into the ground) illustrates, thermite is used to destroy vehicles, artillery, and equipment to which one has close access. White phosphorus is packed into mortar and artillery rounds to be scattered over a target area to ignite canvas, wood, and other flammable materials used by the enemy. This definition includes uniforms. As has been mentioned, white phosphorus is very difficult to extinguish until it burns itself out. It will burn deep into flesh, drawing oxygen from the organic material around it. It is not supposed to be used against personnel, but if they are too close to the targeted materials (in their uniforms, which are the real target), tough luck. We were trained to use it against forward arming points, motor pools, and supply dumps. It is against the rules to use it indiscriminately to just blanket an area, but Russia doesn't give a shit about rules.
  21. That's so obviously a guy in a bad bigfoot costume that it hurts.
  22. They're shaped like that to decrease their radar signatures to improve their stealth. Doesn't appear to help with mines, though.
  23. Russia is getting better at own goals lately. An SU-35, an SU-25, now a patrol craft. If the trend continues, they'll self destruct a sub or destroyer next.
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