The Abode of McThag

I was not getting the, normal, published, numbers for .30-06's range when plugging in the real-world numbers for bullet length.

M2 ball is an inch long.

It doesn't give the correct range until...

I stop rounding to the nearest 0.5 of the length to diameter ratio (LDR) like they say to do...

AND

Increase the bullet length to 1.33 inches.

That gives an LDR of 4.43 instead of the actual, historical, 3.33.

It's still not quite right, but it's WAY closer with 1,100/4,600 instead of 880/3,700.  The official .30-06 numbers are 1,100/4,500.

With this glitch in mind, should I make all other bullets 1/3 longer too? 

Ilhan Omar thinks we should have Federal gun registration.

Yeah, right.  Let's ignore that the number of firearms is increasing steadily and the rate of crime done with them is falling.

As Fuddbusters points out, let's say the, ever efficient, Feral Gubmint can register a gun a minute.

There's 637 to 985 million firearms out there to register!

At one a minute...  1,215.28 to 1,897.2 years.

This assumes 100% compliance, and even traditionally polite and law-abiding Canada can't get that!

We're also seeing the effects of giving up personal arms in places like Great Britain.

Compliance is gonna be low.

Even saying, "we're gonna register all the new guns and not worry about the almost a billion already out there!" adds 47.7 years of registration at one gun a minute every year for the 25 million guns added to the supply.

I think they can record and register the new guns a lot faster than one a minute.

It's possible to register all the new guns.

It's not possible to account for all the existing guns.

When a gun is damaged beyond repair, there's no requirement to tell anyone about it.  Some simple precautions and it's in the scrap bin.

Ten years later, what gun?

The non-compliant will simply say they had the proverbial boating accident and without a search of their residence you don't know if they're lying.  You can't know!

This also assumes they hid it IN their residence to be found during a search too.

I think your average clumsy boater is smart enough to cache their accidentally lost guns off site.

Home Depot sells everything you need to hide a gun for decades.

The entire world was on the gold standard in the 16th and 17th centuries.

One of the reasons for the golden age of piracy was the massive devaluation of gold thanks to Spain massively increasing the supply of available gold in Europe because they were moving it from the new world.

It's a great example of how even gold can have inflation.

It seems unlikely that we're going to find a massive enough amount of gold to cause it to devalue like when Spain toppled all those kingdoms in the new world, but Elon is still working on super heavy launchers.

Who knows what's in the asteroids?

How many prosecutions for illegal machine gun possession are there?

Nothing I found on Google really says it distinctly and clearly.

This pdf from 1995 says 262,300 arrests for firearm offenses in 1993...  Real up to date information.

Google's AI answer is:

There is no single, regularly updated number for machine gun prosecutions, as this data is not tracked separately from other firearm charges. However, the increasing number of recovered illegal machine gun conversion devices (such as "Glock switches") suggests a rise in related cases. For example, the number of these devices recovered by the ATF at crime scenes jumped 570% from 2012-2016 to 2017-2021, increasing from 814 to 5,454. 

Machine gun conversion device statistics
• 2012–2016: 814 machine gun conversion devices recovered seized
• 2017–2021: 5,454 machine gun conversion devices recovered seized, a 570% increase
• 2019: 658 machine gun conversion devices traced
• 2023: 4,530 machine gun conversion devices recovered seized and traced by the ATF
Related prosecution and sentencing statistics
• While specific machine gun prosecution numbers are not available, overall federal weapons prosecutions have been rising.
• The number of federal felony convictions reached an all-time high of 9,559 in fiscal year 2022, continuing a trend of increases under the current administration.
• In 2023, the U.S. Attorney's office saw an increase in the number of felony arrests that resulted in prosecution. 

Notice they don't stick to apples or oranges in that answer?

It also doesn't mention a thing about arrests or prosecutions.

But... the five years of 2017 to 2021 gives 1,090.8 MG conversion devices traced a year.

If California is 28.3% of the gun owners in the US and the percentage of seizures* is even across the nation (yeah right!) then just 308.7 of those devices are from California.

Definitely need to harass the millions of legal gun owners there for that!

Even if ALL of the 1,090.8 devices were from California it's still bullshit to punish the innocent for the activities of criminals.  There's probably more than a million Glocks in private hands in California and that's only 1/10% of them.  Statistical noise even at the max annual rate.  Just half a percent if ALL of the 2017 to 2021 seizures were in Cali.  Even less for 2023...

Divide these numbers by 13 or so for the national estimate of 13 million Glocks in the USA.  0.03% of Glocks are seized with a switch if ALL MG conversion devices seized are Glock switchs!

But Glock's design needs to change.

But I'm willing to bet there's a substantial overlap in the Venn diagram between "gang member," "felon," "frequent offender," and "possession of illegal MG conversion device."

*I say seized and not recovered because recovered implies that the devices belonged to the government, who somehow lost them and is now retrieving them from the criminals.

The Army loses an M240 and finds it later = recovered.

MC Thug is arrested with a Glock switch from Temu = seized.

The Traveller jump drive is essentially a fusion power plant and bank of capacitors.

I've found conflicting information, but it would appear that all of the jump fuel is consumed prior to jump.  Drop tanks are canon and they don't work otherwise.

One source says "about an hour" between jumps if you have the fuel.

So a Type S has to move 270,000 liters of liquid hydrogen in an hour.

At about 2m per second that needs about a 10" pipe.

I seem to remember that a jump can take place in a single 20 minute combat turn, so we're going to need a bigger pipe than that!

If we move it faster, just over 3m per second we can get away with a 12" pipe.  17" if we don't speed up the flow.

12" pipe fits with my mental image of how the engineering spaces look.

Old Radar Tech dropped some estimated numbers for the degraded .30 Carbine performance and it's spot on the same as .30 Super Carry.

Ouch. 

A local weatherman posted a bar graph showing how much hotter the Gulf of Mexico America was than the average.

Average?  Do the mean the mean?  Mode?  Median?  They don't say.

But I happen to know something about math and a bit about statistics.

This is cherry picking.

The average they used is arbitrary and suspect that it's not near so bad if you calculated the mean temp from 1878 to present.

But why stop at 1878?

I happen to know a bit about The Old West too.  We had some record cold going on in the 19th century.  Like the year without a summer, 1816?  Four of the worst seven years for cold are in the 1800's and another is 1978 which is used in their determination for their mean.

You don't think they would have picked an average that's cooler than normal and then picked a start point that's also colder than average to make the current temperatures seem abnormally high, would they?

I got accused of having Dunning Krueger.

But Thag know this math. 

But this is what they did say:

With inflation, though, $99 billion becomes $1,020,618,556,701.03 today, according to this site.  $182.16 billion becomes $1,877,938,144,329.90.

The $1.88 trillion accounts for both inflation and population growth.

But the meme says revenue was $4.05 trillion!  That just more than twice the revenue we'd expect to collect if nothing but population and inflation had changed since 1962.

This is REVENUE, not spending.  Revenue is taxes collected and has nothing to do with the size of the government.

Revenue, is only increasing at 215.7% faster than the population, by the way.

The 1031% inflation since 1962 is more concerning, but that's not what they were trying to say.

Learn some business math, kids.

That way you can check their numbers and see if they're trying to trick you. 

 PS: A population increase from 180 million to 330 million is an 83.33% increase, not 184%. (Fixed!  Thanks FuzzyGeff!)  They even rounded wrong.

Are fractions really that hard and terrifying?

Because I am sick of reading, "20 times less" when they mean 1/20th.

This is easy math.  Try it at home.

20 x 1 = 20.  Is 20 more or less than 1?

20 x 20 = 400.  Is 400 more or less than 20?

When you multiply it's always MORE not less.

Even if you use smaller numbers.

20 x 0.001 = 0.02.  0.02 is more than 0.001. 

It's high time we made journalists take some fucking math classes.

Wal Mart is eliminating 1,500 positions.

Sounds huge, right?

That's from 2.1 million employees.

That's 0.07% of the people they employ.

I'm willing to bet that they have a daily churn of more people than that from employees quitting or getting fired.

But reporting it breathlessly like Wal Mart is close to bankruptcy for making a tiny correction in the number of employees?

Bitch please.

Champions/Hero and GURPS are both point based systems.

A significant difference between them is how the point totals are calculated.

GURPS subtracts the disadvantages from the total.  So if you spent 195 points on stats, advantages, perks and skills and -45 points in disadvantages and quirks, you would be a 150 point character.  This is the standard 150/40/5 format.

A Hero character with the same points spent would be a 195 point character.  The difference is disadvantages are added to the base point pool. 

It took a bit too long for me to internalize the difference.

But I'm a draftsman who converted LOTS of ordnance to GURPS for Twilight: 2000.

The controversy at hand is a claim that the PGU-28A/B 20mm SAPHEI (semi-armor piercing high-explosive incendiary) is as good as a hand grenade.

One poster commented that a grenade the size of their thumb wasn't very impressive.

Our pilot countered that an M67 fragmentation grenade had 6.7 oz of explosive and the PGU-28 has 4.5 oz.

I remembered how the 25mm round for the XM25 was often criticized for a lack of boom so I wondered if our pilot was correct.

So I looked up the PGU-28A/B.

The manufacturer says the total projectile weight is 3.5 oz.  That's the body, explosives, detonators, incendiaries, tracer, the whole shebang.

I also found a drawing of the round:

If you scale that you'll find the Comp A-4 filler is 11mm in diameter and 24mm long.  That gives us a mere 0.21 oz. of explosive.  Not a big boom.

Also any fragmentation is going to come from breaking the projectile body instead of using a pre-fragmented wire, like the M67.  That's uneven and erratic fragmentation, and there won't be much of it.

Data culled from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) show far more deaths associated with the vaccine than with measles infection.

If a vaccine is successful at immunizing people from a disease, then you should expect that more people will die from an adverse reaction to the vaccine than from the disease.

This is like noting that since transatlantic travel transitioned from ships to planes that there are far more deaths from plane crashes than shipwrecks now.

Did you know that every year the earth actually rotates 366.24 times?

"But there are only 365 days in a year!" I hear you object.

Both are true.

We lose a "day" each year to our rotation around the sun.

Neat, huh?

I think I messed up the affliction for the skunk.

Bad Smell is, I believe, the primary effect of being sprayed by a skunk with blindness and coughing only happening as follow-on secondary effects.

Going to make it cost more, of course.

Being a skunk is expensive! 

Update:  Turns out I already had official stats for the skunk's spray in Dungeon Fantasy 5: Allies.  They are cheaper than what I had.

Affliction 1 (DX; Based on DX, Both rolls, +40%; Disadvantage, Bad Smell, +10%; Extended Duration, x300, +100%; Malediction 1, +100%; Nauseated, +30%) [38] 

That gives us:

Exalted Skunk

-67 Points

Attribute Modifiers: ST -4 (No Fine Manipulators, -40%) [-24]; DX +2 (No Fine Manipulators, -40%) [24].

Secondary Characteristic Modifiers: SM -3.

Advantages: Acute Hearing +5 [10]; Affliction 1 (DX; Based on DX, Both rolls, +40%; Disadvantage, Bad Smell, +10%; Extended Duration, x300, +100%; Malediction 1, +100%; Nauseated, +30%) [38]; Blunt Claws [3]; Discriminatory Smell [15]; Fur [1]; Night Vision 5 [5]; Sharp Teeth [1].

Disadvantages: Bad Sight (Nearsighted) [-25]; Cannot Speak [-15]; Quadruped [-35]; Social Stigma (Wild Animal) [-10]; Restricted Vision (Tunnel Vision) [-30]; Wealth (Dead Broke) [-25].

Features: Tail.

Originally Posted By SuperSixOne:
8% per year isn't 35% over 5 years. That's not how math works.

But it is.

I'll grant, it's not quite 35%, it's very close.

0.92^5 is 65.91% or a 34.09% total reduction.

Do it another way...

8% reduction in the first year is 92%

8% the second year is 84.64%

8% the third year is 77.87%

8% the fourth year is 71.64%

8% in the fifth year brings us to 65.91%!

It's pretty simple math.

In 1972 the average price of regular gas was 36.9¢ per gallon.

With the 655.18% inflation since then, gas should be $2.789 per gallon.

Last time I filled it was $3.159.

Corrected for inflation, gas is about 13% more today than in 1972.

The $1.199 gas of 1991 should be $2.779 gas today.

But the $3.699 gas of 2012 should be $5.089 today, so something went right and gas prices broke from the rest of inflation.

I think the people in charge of stealing Arizona for Harris are stuck in an error loop where they're trying to figure out how many fake votes they need to add to make Maricopa county's results miraculously give 44 electoral votes for Arizona instead of 11.

Journalism, Poly-Sci and Woman's and Minorities Studies majors don't typically do well with math, so they can't see that you cannot get there from here.

We engineering types are, generally, contemptuous of such innumeracy.

They're the product of the education system they wanted, so I don't offer any sympathy either.

I've been considering the range stats I give to 6.5 Grendel and wondering if I should add the 10% fudge factor allowed in Vehicles for the range.

That would change it from 730/4,000 to 800/4,400 with a 16" barrel.

This is .270 Win v .30-06 all over again with the rules favoring the bigger round.

6.5 really does hang onto velocity longer than 6.8; I've never disputed it.  My dispute was always that 6.8 was just as good where everyone but a sniper or long range target shooter would use it.

For humane hunting and combat, there's not a lot of difference between them.

But wait!  There's more!

6.8 really shouldn't have a longer 1/2D range...  What's missing from the equation?  I remembered something and went back to check.

While the 6.8 community had settled in hard for 16" (with midlength gas) as the "standard" barrel...  Most of the velocity numbers quoted by 6.5 advocates were for the 24" barrel.

That changes the damage to 6d+1 pi and the range to 870/4,400 without fudge factor.

There we go!

6.5 Grendel now GURPS!

It's also underscoring what lots of 6.8 people have been saying for a while, the Grendel folks (at least the furries) weren't comparing apples to apples.  In a couple of the proposed head to heads they wouldn't even concede to use the same LOWER...  Which shouldn't matter to comparing the two rounds.

I did the math.  Harvey got a 17% increase in pay over the past four years.

I see that the IAMAW is demanding about twice that from Boeing over the next four years.

I will admit, they're demanding their pay keeps up with inflation and, unlike Harvey, can extort it from their employer.

But, over and over, with unions in manufacturing: their salary increase has to come from somewhere and it inevitably comes from the white collar side.

You know, the high salary, experienced, engineers; leaving cheaper and less experienced engineers to do the job.

And people are actually surprised when quality drops.

With Boeing, the IAMAW might be learning what Caterpillar workers did.  The minimum wage is $0 an hour when your company either dramatically contracts or goes under altogether.  Boeing appears to be aiming at the latter from a lack of wins lately.