Posted on 04/09/2007 6:15:08 PM PDT by Tatze
KEWL!!!
Yeah, but I never did understand the Stormtrooper’s armor. It didn’t seem to protect them from anything.
A lot of heavier weapons already use a muzzle brake, which diverts some of the gas pressure that follows the bullet to help absorb the recoil of the weapon. Also keeps the muzzle from climbing to allow faster follow-up shots.
On a slightly different track, the effects folks that did the "Alien" series of movies adapted a Steady-Cam rig as a weapon platform. The Steady-Cam harness and mount are a system that allows a portable mini-cam to be moved very smoothly. I am not sure if anyone actually tried to fire a real firearm from the movie prop...
Who will protect the tyrannical government from an ambitious military?
(I'd say "I'd buy that for a dollar!", except I know that stuff costs more.)
What the hell does it matter when our pos politicians castrate our military?
Perhaps the US Constitution and the Officer’s Oath to preserve, protect and defend it. It has always been what has kept us from tyranny. It will do so far into the future.
LLS
I should hope that if our government becomes a more tyrannical one, an invincible military would step up and restore Constitutional rule. It would surprise me if it happened, however.
Because she couldn’t resist...
LLS
Also, will this high tech stuff hold up after 30 days of use in any environment with grunts leaving it laying around in the mud, dirt, rain, etc?
Infantry types aren't known for taking care of delicate equipment. If it's breakable, a grunt can (and will) break it.
For a hypothetical future military to overthrow a tyrannical civil government would require the officers in charge to 1) think WAY outside the box, and 2) act on those thoughts.
It would take a genuine over-the-top condition of civil injustice for that to happen.
They could outfit some of our special forces boys with them, though.
“It would surprise me because today’s military is trained first and foremost to obey orders...”
They’re trained to obey legal orders. Also, if all the books I’ve read on soldiers are true, they have no problem thinking for themselves.
“For a hypothetical future military to overthrow a tyrannical civil government would require the officers in charge to 1) think WAY outside the box, and 2) act on those thoughts.”
Aren’t those some of the things special forces are trained to do?
Yes, but...I'll believe it when I see it, and hopefully I'll never hope to see it.
Our military officers and men aren't Star Wars clones. They come from our communities, sat next to us in school, maybe dated our sisters. If any tyrannical government faced a popular uprising so severe that the military was called in to suppress it, the soldiers and officers would face the decision on whether to fire on their neighbors, or people a lot like them, or to turn against Washington.
There hasn't been a successful revolution since the American that didn't involve large factions of the military changing sides (and even in the American revolution, which wasn't really a revolution, many of the key officers had some service to the Crown under their belts). In France and Russia, conscript soldiers had more sympathy for their kin than for their officers, and in China, the communists essentially were part of the military, having teamed up with the nationalists -- all the while beefing up their recruiting and fighting skills -- to fight the Japanese.
It would take a genuine over-the-top condition of civil injustice for that to happen.
Isn't that the way we want it? I'd hate to live in a country that has a military coup every few years over relatively mundane political disagreements.
Like I said...hopefully I’ll never hope to see it.
Right. Nothing in Newton mandates that an equal and opposite reaction has to be in the opposite direction along the same axis. Just fire a Walther PPK (I have; my great-uncle brought one home from WWII) and a modern 9mm, and you can feel how much of a difference modern refinements make. They can't eliminate the reactive force, but they can redirect it.
On a slightly different track, the effects folks that did the "Alien" series of movies adapted a Steady-Cam rig as a weapon platform. The Steady-Cam harness and mount are a system that allows a portable mini-cam to be moved very smoothly. I am not sure if anyone actually tried to fire a real firearm from the movie prop...
I doubt that it would work. The way a steadicam works -- or the optical image stabilization in some camcorders -- is that it's all very loose and fluid. It makes sure that the bumps and jars when the cameraman walks are dampened before they reach the camera.
That fluidity would be a problem with a gun - you need some rigidity if you want the second and third shots to go pretty close to where you pointed the first one. Of course, since we're talking about sci-fi technology here, you could have not just recoil suppression, but recoil correction -- servos that actively push the barrel back down to correct.
Well, only sort of. A lot of the Founders would be horrified by the size of our standing army -- they thought militias could do the job, and were much more democratic. Washington, on the other hand, knew from hard-won experience how poorly hastily-assembled militias performed against professional soldiers.
“It would take a genuine over-the-top condition of civil injustice for that to happen”
Raise your hand if you believe something like that’ll happen if Hitlery becomes President. *raises hand*
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