Possibly, but there are real, meant-for-combat weapons and armors with extensive decorations as well.

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There's very little information about this specific sword, the only thing I could find was about some connection with some so-called "Black Sea yatagans" (http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=29419)

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nope, it's 5.56, it's just the peculiar Beta C-Mag style of drum (which is actually two drums that combine into a single straight magazine section)

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It could be that, but it might also just be a holdover from the then-current style of stock designs, meant for rifles which didn't have a separate pistol grip. Tokarev's prototype from this same period is one of the most egregious, it's basically just an SVT with a pistol grip tacked on (and converted to 7.62x39mm, of course), leaving that part of the stock pretty much pointless

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I feel like the protrusion here is a bit too small, some examples of proper machine guns with stocks meant for you to hold on for contrast:

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It could be that for the prototype itself, the designers were just using existing materials (like, they just took a stock from another gun they had lying around the workshop), and this would have been changed had the gun gone further into trials - for example, Bulkin's entry starts out with a stock with a lump like Kuzmishchev's, and gets a straighter stock (much like the one the AK has) later on:

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I think it's thin wood with a leather covering? Not sure, https://www.saporitisword.com/portfolios/flower-german-dagger/ only mentions the maker of the scabbard but no further details. This other photo has a better view of the inside:

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huh, apparently: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/DS-1_Orbital_Battle_Station#Imperial_construction

Star Wars lore really has everything covered, I guess... also what:

The project dragged out over nineteen years as labor union disputes along with the supply and design problems slowed the construction

uh... good on the Empire for still having unions, I guess (do not hand it to 'em for the slavery though)? I love how this project is simultaneously using both slaves and unionized workers

I think the meme was made mostly in response to the "the Rebels were actually evil for blowing it up because of all the innocent workers on board" takes, by the Battle of Yavin there probably weren't any Wookiee slaves still hanging around

https://xcancel.com/BrianJBerletic/status/1862865293284192720

Regarding Syria:

1. Maintain perspective - as bad as the worst case scenario may seem, Syria had previously been almost entirely overrun before Russia's intervention in 2015 including fighting in and around Damascus itself;

2. This is going to shape Russia's calculus regarding Ukraine - clearly any deals made with Western proxies to freeze a conflict toward "peace" will only be used to prepare for more war;

3. Russia/Syria still maintain an advantage in military aviation, taking a heavy toll out on advancing US-backed terrorists - a factor that played heavily in their defeat leading up to the long-standing freeze in the first place;

4. Escalation in Syria is going to stretch Russia, Syria, and Iran, but also the US and its allies;

5. Only time will tell how this plays out, no one should assume one way or the other unless compelling evidence emerges - opensource information only gives part of the picture;

https://xcancel.com/BrianJBerletic/status/1863068727337710071

• be very careful with information coming out. US-backed terrorists use disinformation as a weapon. Believe nothing until it is confirmed;

• That doesn't mean the situation is not dire, but wait for reliable information before drawing conclusions;

• AGAIN - be VERY careful with "opensource" photos/videos which do not provide a full picture of the situation;

• It is very easy to stage a scene and then post it making claims that do not reflect reality, if the Ukrainians do this, surely US-proxies elsewhere can;

• Do not panic. Much of the US' success depends on psychologically overwhelming opponents. Panic aids terrorists and their US sponsors;

• Criticizing the Syrian military for withdrawing is easy to do from a comfortable desk chair. Unless you are on the front holding your part of the line, don't complain about those who are not;

• There are many legitimate reasons why the Syrian army would withdraw from certain areas, just as the Russian army withdrew in 2022 from Kharkov and Kherson, it does not signify the end of the war;

this video that @lost_in_time@hexbear.net posted goes over things, it's not known for sure, but aside from aesthetics, some potential practical applications are:

• aiding in binding the blade to an opponent's weapon, particularly for things like zweihanders which were used against pikes - so you'd try to hit the enemy's pike and move it out of the way, with the wavy blade helping your sword to dig into the pike's shaft and allowing you to control it

• preventing blade grabbing - while it seems pretty scary to grab even a normal blade, there are historical manuscripts which demonstrate techniques like that (definitely not something to be used as a first resort, but still applicable in specific situations - getting your hand sliced up is better than getting outright killed, after all), and a wavy blade makes getting a proper grip on a blade (where you don't get cut up) a lot harder

• possibly for creating worse wounds in certain contexts, like hunting

It might actually be a magazine, this other picture doesn't seem to have anything sticking out:

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but it's definitely not the normal magazine that would be used, that one would be (rather ridiculously long):

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"for when you go to the range and want to shoot EXACTLY <small-number> rounds" magazines do actually exist - they're meant for the early stage of development, when you're testing the purely mechanical aspects of the gun's accuracy (so, not the ergonomic aspect of how a real person aims it and controls the recoil, just "does the barrel stabilize the bullet enough", things like that, and also "will it not blow up when firing" if you happen to be developing a whole new cartridge), and will have the gun locked in some kind of vise, where a long magazine sticking out the bottom can be very inconvenient

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it's an internal magazine loaded via stripper clip, like the C96 Mauser, but in a much more inconvenient spot (hence why it's so tall):

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Gotta be Pripyat in Call of Pripyat, it's maybe a bit too empty, but that adds to the atmosphere to some extent. That's something I actually really appreciate about CoP, it doesn't feel the need to throw enemies at you nearly everywhere you go, it's content to just let you wander around a pretty much empty factory complex and jump at shadows.

Limansk from Clear Sky I like conceptually, but the actual level in-game is mostly a linear shooting gallery, unfortunately. But still, I'm just a sucker for exploring decaying urban environments

guns with top magazines like this usually have their sights offset on the side:

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(this specifically is a Bren gun, but all of the different WW2-era machine guns in this style, like the ZB-26 and the Japanese ones have a similar setup)

https://xcancel.com/ArmchairW/status/1860538358205755641

Remember that Ukraine retains a vested interest in fomenting a wider war, no matter what decisions their sponsors may or may not have made in the matter. Every cope drone raid or jury-rigged Ukrainian ballistic is going to be claimed as Western missiles from now on.

As expected, the huge ATACMS raid from earlier turned into a bunch of cope drones and two unidentified but apparently not very threatening missiles once the smoke cleared. These rumors WILL keep circulating going forward, however.

https://xcancel.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/1860510537303441418

@AntonLaGuardia: INDOPACOM commander, Adml Samuel Paparo, says he expects Russia will provide submarine technology to China that will help it to close the gap with the US. Also expects RU to provide missile and sub technology to North Korea. #HFX2024

Biden’s idea of a smart tradeoff: approving/assisting ATACMs missile strikes inside Russia, changing nothing in a lost war…vs pushing Russia to transfer submarine tech to China and N Korea giving them near peer submarine capabilities. He’s just that fucking good.

...

Pro-Ukrainian propaganda is saying ... the US is going to reverse engineer it from the scraps at Yuzhmash

???

yes, I'm sure the missiles that vaporized an entire factory complex totally left behind "scraps" what the fuck are these people even on about

(leaving a regular twitter link here since xcancel doesn't seem to highlight the specific post in a thread properly)

1. Am I missing something obvious, or is the new upvote policy and the motivation for it not in any way explained in this post, or in the proposals post, or anywhere visible? I had to trawl through a bunch of posts to even find out what's going on, from what I could see, the policy is explained and introduced in this comment, in a now locked thread, in a comm we've only had for like 3 weeks, that has a grand total, of, uh, 64 subscribers? Is this what we mean by transparency?

   Like, imagine if someone was, I dunno, hiking in the mountains for the past month, and they suddenly come back to some new moderation policies that will be entirely incomprehensible if you haven't gone through 10000 comments worth of site lore. I mean, I actually did fucking follow the tanks drama, but I guess I miss like one fucking thread and now I might as well be completely out of the loop.

   For a site where we often tell people to touch grass, we sure as hell seem to expect everyone to be terminally online enough to keep up with our incessant stupidity if they want to have any chance of understanding why any action is being taken.

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2. I'm also throwing my hat into the ring as a habitual upvoter. Like, I don't quite use upvotes as a "read" button, but I definitely don't think too much about it. I upvote pretty much anyone who responds to one of my posts, unless they say something particularly disagreeable, I dunno, it just feels like... a courtesy somehow? Sometimes people will make some joke or obscure reference that goes completely over my head, and I'll just sit there and ponder it for a minute... and upvote it anyway

   I dunno, it sounds stupid, but am I expected to treat every button press through a purely rational and analytical lens here? I'm not the site's fucking UX designer, I'm just a monkey who clicks on things.

   I do use it as a "read" button in exorbitantly long threads (which, you know, we do get a fucking lot of), sometimes I'll see that a response descends into , upvote it, scroll down to read some other, shorter subthreads, and then come back to finish reading the first one. Now, sometimes I'll get tired and give up on reading the rest of the thread, and thus obviously not upvote the remaining comments in it, but this isn't any sort of indication that I agreed with the first few responses and disagreed with the remaining ones, it's just an indication of where I lost interest and gave up .

   I will also often upvote both sides of an argument too (as long as, again, one side isn't being particularly disagreeable or impolite, and it should obviously be noted here that the line between "I mildly disagree with this but will still upvote it" and "I definitely won't upvote this" is inherently vague, arbitrary, and vibes-based, I'm not a Sentiment Analysis algorithm, I'm a human being, with moods, and headaches, and various petty attitudes that I may or may not even be consciously aware of). There isn't much rhyme or reason to this, the idea of "upvote = agreement/support" is just entirely disconnected from users' behavior here.

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3. I pretty much stay out of struggle session discourse (aside from, occasionally, uh... lurking the threads and silently upvoting the side I agree with , but I guess I'll have to stop doing that lest I end up backing the losing side in one of those ), this is maybe the first time I'm posting something serious in one, but this is genuinely starting to wear on me, it's been what, 3 weeks of near-permanent revolution struggle? Every time I see a new pinned thread a sense of dread comes over me, how long is this going to fucking go on for? Can we just like, put a fucking moratorium on policy changes until things calm down a bit?

   ⠀

4. I'll link a couple of @Frank@hexbear.net's comments from the past thread, since he's way more eloquent on this than I'll ever be, and I'm not sure how many people have even seen that thread (refer to pt. 1): on the inversion of mod/user roles and on discipline requiring trust.

   The last one in particular I will reiterate - discipline requires trust. At this stage, I am not sure if I can reasonably trust the moderation team: the mod statements from the previous drama, the embarrassing "self-crit" of one of those mods that followed, the fact that you made someone an admin with the reasoning of "well, they used to be an admin before!", said person proceeded to completely mismanage the situation, start randomly handing out bans as some form of humor (?!), and just casually nope out of the mess they created and delete their entire presence here (I don't care how many times you say "we disagree with her decisions", the fact that this was allowed to happen in the first place is such a severe lapse in judgement that I don't even know what to fucking say), the attempt at some kind of Tom Clancy scheme of manipulating other lemmy instances for some reason... given all of this, just this general caliber of decision-making competence on display here, how am I supposed to trust the moderation team to actually pore over individual users posts and upvotes and engage in some kind of internet psychoanalysis in order to discipline them fairly?

   I understand and sympathize that lemmy's moderation tools are lacking, but that's not the fault of the users. In fact, the general attitude of a lot of the userbase seems to be broadly critical of this site being a reddit offshoot! Although this is of course difficult to objectively judge (some of this is just ironic "phpBB forums... they don't make 'em like they used to *sip*" posting, and many users don't actively comment so their attitude is unknown), the broad popularity of the megathreads does seem to indicate the posters yearn for a different kind of site structure than the one we have. Now, at this stage it's of course not really an option to just throw the site away and begin anew as something else, but still, being stuck with a shitty website that lacks functionality isn't something the users should be punished over!

what was the point of the last few weeks?

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.45 is a bit chunkier, and polymer magazines add even more bulk (since they generally need to be thicker than a steel magazine of roughly-equivalent reliability)

the UMP9 compared to an MP5 really shows this, since they're both in 9mm

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I stumbled on the OST for the unreleased Jazz Jackrabbit 3 recently, and I keep playing this track every now and again, it's such a banger. This whole subgenre from Epic Games' early efforts (and stuff those composers did for other companies) is really cool, I with there more games beyond the Unreals and Deus Ex with that style. This track from Unreal 2 is another great one

The cut Downtown theme from Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines, it's just such a vibe

Fertile Rondo from Bayonetta 3 is also just , great 5th Element vibes

Brain Freeze from Yuri's Revenge, I miss the "just stick some old movie/TV quotes in" era of electronic music

This track from Descent (this particular recording off a Roland SC-55, I'm pretty sure I originally found it on youtube but it seems like that upload may have been taken down, and a lot of the other ones I could find don't sound as good)

The whole Neotokyo soundtrack really, just an absolute masterpiece composed for a free mod for some reason. Some standouts: Beacon, Imbrium, Tachi, I just absolutely love the combination of more electronic sounds with strings and piano in a lot of these.

On the more ambient side of things, STALKER has some great ones, Call of Pripyat especially, like the Pripyat theme

and it's actually an AK-style long-stroke piston underneath, so even better

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it's difficult to merge that deep simulation system with the capability to do narrative traditional game design

Definitely, games that try this do need to abandon traditional narratives to some extent, which is a big ask for a typical publisher - and unfortunately, the complexity of such systems also puts them out of the reach of indie games which can otherwise afford to be more experimental (although Rain World is supposed to have some pretty amazing AI simulation too) - these kind of projects really have to be AA games, big enough to manage the complexity, but small enough to be allowed to actually do it instead of flattening everything in pursuit of more market share. And the AA side of the industry has unfortunately massively declined.

Space Rangers' main narrative isn't really much more than "liberate all star systems and defeat the big boss commanding the enemy" - there's a bit of detail about the war itself, but it's mostly revealed in big text boxes, which is moreso lore than narrative I guess. However, it's still got plenty of stories, thanks to the baffling(ly amazing) decision to just stick like a 100 mini-text-adventure games in as side quests. Get caught by the cops for your piratical crimes and sent to jail? Oh boy, we've got a whole text adventure of you having to manage your relations with the prisoners and the guards, choosing who to snitch on, getting into, uh, trained cockroach races (?), ratting out the horrible prison conditions to journalists, and much more! There's also presidential elections, cooking competitions, just a whole ton of random stuff, I have no idea what they were thinking but it turned out pretty great.

Grand strategy games like Crusader Kings also utilize such dynamic systems to great effect while forsaking typical narrative, but they're their own niche (and while Paradox does make cool stuff, they do also nickel-and-dime people for like 100 different DLCs per game...)