I love funny guns

  • LukácsFan1917@lemmy.ml
    ·
    9 hours ago

    Oh wait this is that Jake Hanrahan dipshit who collaborated with sex pest Andrew Callaghan to try to promote anarchist militias in Ukraine fighting alongside Azov, fuck this guy. Don't post him. Find another source next time.

  • The_Grinch [he/him]
    ·
    12 hours ago

    Had they not made it look like a gun no one would have known what it was.

  • gay_king_prince_charles [she/her, he/him]
    ·
    17 hours ago

    lathe-of-heaven the first military use of a small-arms railgun will be made of duct tape and PVC and will be used to kill Shigeru Ishiba a decade after he retires

  • Coca_Cola_but_Commie [he/him]
    ·
    15 hours ago

    "In Japan they have a gun that kills the memory of a man." -some tweet I saw when Abe was killed.

      • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]
        ·
        19 hours ago

        Have etymologists ever conclusively settled on whether the term "duct tape" or "duck tape" came first?

        • Thordros [he/him, comrade/them]
          ·
          18 hours ago

          Yes. Duck tape came first. The original iteration of the product was cotton duck cloth with an adhesive backing.

          • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]
            ·
            18 hours ago

            That's what I figured, but I remember hearing something about some people objecting to this and insisting that "duct tape" came first after all.

            Incidentally, "duck" in this case is cognate with, among other things, Norwegian duk meaning "tablecloth" among other things.

  • ReadFanon [any, any]
    ·
    20 hours ago

    The person who tweeted this, Jake Hanrahan, isn't someone I trust and I'd encourage other people to be cautious about him and his work. He's too cosy with the agents of imperialism, he doesn't strike me as a person who is anything more than aligned with the left (mostly) due to opportunism, and personally I'm kinda waiting on his Tim Pool arc.

    • lapis [fae/faer, comrade/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      16 hours ago

      I dunno, I rather enjoyed his mini-documentary on JStark1809 and the FGC9, and the Popular Front magazine is an enjoyable read. Jake's definitely very brit-pilled, but he does good work, all things considered. also I'm not sure if one can even be a war journalist without either being cozy with the agents of imperialism or mysteriously getting hit by a stray shell or three in the back of the head in a non-combat zone.

      • ReadFanon [any, any]
        ·
        15 hours ago

        I'm not saying that he does bad journalism or there's no value in his work, I just don't trust him.

        His coverage can be skewed and there's a difference between being strategic about your coverage and consciously sidling up to the agents of imperialism and acting as their stenographer. Take this podcast episode of his on the Uyghur issue. Set aside the editorial position that he takes on the Uyghur issue itself and listen to the way he never attempts to question how his guest arrives at any of his claims, no matter how outrageous and impossible to verify, and note how he never pushes back on a single issue. Watch to see how long it takes before he mentions his guest's employer and affiliation - you wouldn't know throughout the entire episode, perhaps at all if you (like most people) skip the end credits of a podcast episode. Even if you figure out who he is and who he works for, the damage is largely done because the audience's skepticism is not primed throughout the episode where Hanrahan does his best Joe Rogan impression of naively swallowing his guest's every claim without an ounce of skepticism.

        Nathan Ruser works for the ASPI, an Australian non-government organisation which receives most of its funding from the Australian government but which also receives a good deal of funding from military contractors. They are a far right organisation that directly influences Australian military and foreign policy, much like how the RAND Corporation does for the US.

        Ruser manufactures consent for the war machine. He works hand in glove with the military-industrial complex. Hanrahan positions himself as being on the left and of being "anti-authoritarian". He's more slick than the crass NAFO bros who position themselves as libertarian leftists or anarcho-somethings but he is of the same ilk. The anti-authoritarian acting like a dupe swallowing a war hawk's agenda to instigate war with China? Come on.

        To me, he's like a Robert Evans figure - I give them too much credit to say that they are fools. I think it's quite obvious that they are intelligent, thoughtful, and very capable of being critical. What interests me is how they both seem to flip a switch in their brains and suddenly, strategically, they turn all of that off. Evans is anarchist-adjacent yet he works for Bellingcat and collaborates with intelligence and the feds, and he pushes interventionism. Hanrahan, while not being as directly connected to these things, is very close to them and he seems to be perfectly comfortable with them.

        Like I said, I don't trust him. There's nothing about someone who presents themselves as being radical-ish who is pro-NATO, pro-interventionist, and is completely at ease with the MI-Complex and government cutouts that I trust.

        • lapis [fae/faer, comrade/them]
          ·
          11 hours ago

          ah, well, that's disappointing to read. thank you for informing me, though!

          I've always read Hanrahan and Evans with a grain of salt, anyways, but it's unfortunate how it feels like any podcaster with a following seems to inevitably align with neoliberalism to one extent or another.

    • regul [any]
      ·
      15 hours ago

      Yeah that coil is way too short to impart any serious amount of acceleration.

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.ml
      ·
      edit-2
      16 hours ago

      No idea on that one, but you can definitely engineer railguns with off the shelf parts that can be put out similar energy to .22lr I think.

      Saw a video recently of someone creating a homemade railguns that could, if set up properly, exceed the Irish govt's firearms limitations.

      Hell, just searching YouTube I saw a bunch claiming "1.5KJ" which (depending on efficiency and projectile ballistics) could impact similar energy onto a target as a 9mm handgun, if my duck duck go-ing serves me right.

          • VOLCEL_POLICE [it/its]B
            ·
            16 hours ago

            Show

            The VOLCEL POLICE are on the scene! PLEASE KEEP YOUR VITAL ESSENCES TO YOURSELVES AT ALL TIMES.

            نحن شرطة VolCel.بناءا على تعليمات الهيئة لترويج لألعاب الفيديو و النهي عن الجنس نرجوا الإبتعاد عن أي أفكار جنسية و الحفاظ على حيواناتكم المنويَّة حتى يوم الحساب. اتقوا الله، إنك لا تراه لكنه يراك.

            volcel-police

    • Biddles [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      20 hours ago

      Probably not if the bullet is fast enough, right? Air rushing into barrel, or bullet breaking the sound barrier

      • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
        ·
        19 hours ago

        A coilgun that size isn't going to be making anything supersonic. I would be genuinely surprised if it even matched the force of something like an airsoft gun.

        Honestly this thing looks like a hobbyist toy more than a weapon. Like it might pose a risk of eye injury if fired towards someone, but I wouldn't expect it to even break skin at close range. Unless it's got some absurdly strong capacitor bank powering it and is very well designed it's just not going to put out much force at all. At that scale a railgun might honestly be a better bet for "an at least somewhat dangerous handheld electric projectile launcher", because the problems with those (the surface of the rails oxidizing after a shot or two, so they stop making a good connection with the round and can't fire) only start cropping up when you get to really high velocities and higher power flow.

    • urmums401k [she/her, they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      20 hours ago

      Oh you can build one out of literal trash from the 90s.

      It's just... So there's a lot of energy in gunpowder. Like, a lot. And even being super inefficient and losing a ton if that energy, it's really good at pushing stuff. Its just naturally good at exploding, and over the years, we occasionally make it even better at exploding.

      And we have some pretty good batteries but they really dont compare.

      And then, you know, you need to release a shit ton of energy all at once right? And batteries aren't very good at that. Even if you make them be explosives instead of batteries, they still aren't anywhere near as good as gunpowder at that.

      So you also need a capacitor. Which is more stuff.

      And you've still got a really weak gun, and you need to charge it between shots-not just the battery, but the capacitors(?) In a way you can't really just rotate out-notice how there are three sections of wire there? Thats three thingies to accelerate the slug, which each need a quick (and super well timed but thats not usually a problem AFAIK) boop from a capacitor. So you can't fire fast for long even if youre carrying a huge battery. And overheating is a huuuge problem, because remember what heat does to conductivity. They are not friends.

      So you can't use it in a sustained fight you can't (as easily) hurt someone armored and you can't make your dick feel big with it. Which are most of what militaries care about.

      • TraschcanOfIdeology [they/them, comrade/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        17 hours ago

        If I recall correctly there's also the issue of ballistics. The artillery rail guns have the projectile encased in a sabot AFAIK, something you can't really do in a anti-personnel version, especially if it's handmade. Unless you choose to make a shotgun, and then it's just a the-doohickey with extra steps.

        Edit: I just reviewed some wiki articles and sabot isn't really the right term. But whatever.

      • 7bicycles [he/him]
        ·
        17 hours ago

        And we have some pretty good batteries but they really dont compare.

        I feel like Samsung had a grip there on leading the development of batteries that explode

          • 7bicycles [he/him]
            ·
            14 hours ago

            They could've been great at it if the woke mob didn't cancel Samsung over their combnation smartphone battery / gunpowder substitute tech attainments just because it occasionally burned down a house by itself

        • Formerlyfarman [none/use name]
          ·
          10 hours ago

          You can buy a 12v DC ro 220v DC boost converter and a few 220v capacitors, that's essentially the part that you are scavenging from the camara flash.

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
      ·
      19 hours ago

      AFAIK what the military has been researching are large (naval) railguns. Coilguns are a novelty with minimal utility (note that the actual principles involved in them are used in real things, but mostly for accelerating things along rail systems, not as guns or cannons), but railguns have some promise in pushing the upper limit of what artillery can do (and AFAIK what they were focused on was specifically a hybrid system that would launch a shell with conventional propellant into a railgun barrel that would then accelerate it even harder) because they can get things moving faster than gas can expand and put more force on a projectile than conventional propellant alone could without having a building sized barrel to accommodate the force.

      Ultimately the project made a big fixed emplacement that could launch a projectile faster and harder than any other system, but which was both logistically infeasible due to it rapidly destroying its own barrel (a seemingly intractable problem with railguns is that at high power levels the surface of the rails oxidizes and the rails themselves can warp), and obviated by missiles largely replacing the role of artillery along with "what if we could put a single shell somewhere near a target even faster than a missile, once, and it would take an entire ship dedicated to this task" turning out to not be as useful a niche as sci-fi brained military officials thought it would be fifty years ago.

      • 7bicycles [he/him]
        ·
        17 hours ago

        (note that the actual principles involved in them are used in real things, but mostly for accelerating things along rail systems, not as guns or cannons)

        de-conceptualization [Legendary - Success]: Schwerer Gustav, but you don't shoot from it, you shoot it.

        • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
          ·
          16 hours ago

          I truncated that down a bit because it was already getting a bit too wordy, so I skipped the examples. That would be things like some roller coasters using electromagnetic launch systems over conventional chainlift hills, aircraft catapults on carriers to get them up to speed fast enough to take off, some trains use them for propulsion, etc. It's a really good way of making a big fixed system push things along quickly for definitions of "quickly" that include accelerations humans can comfortably survive, it's just not very good at making a small and portable system for launching projectiles very fast at a speed that a human on the other end of the equation wouldn't comfortably survive.

          • 7bicycles [he/him]
            ·
            16 hours ago

            To be fair if I'm launching the actual schwerer gustav at things I don't think "human that rides on it could survive" is high on the priority list

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
      ·
      20 hours ago

      From what I know the only practical military application of coil guns would be artillery. It's quieter than conventional artillery and also produces no flash or smoke. Small arm coil guns seem hilariously inefficient unless you poison the round or something.

      There's a coil shotgun on the market that has a muzzle energy of about 85 joules. For comparison an average pistol will be around 550 J. A 5.56mm rifle is around 1800 J.