mr2mk1g

I don’t have much respect for a company that actively carries out this sort of misinformation. First be sure it’s the company, not simply someone who really likes their products. This isn’t something I’m fully familiar with, but a place to start could be complaining to the Advertising Standards Agency – here: http://www.asa.org.uk/index.asp They’re a UK agency but they do deal with misleading web advertising and any boarder line activity such as this that might otherwise fall outside the ordinary definition of "advertising". They have agreements with their Spanish equivalent through the European Advertising Standards Agency so if you start a complaint through the ASA it is likely to be passed on through to the Spanish agency. If the ASA doesn’t have jurisdiction for whatever reason they say they will help you find out where you should complain instead.

That's nice list. Wonder why it stops in 1801.... Trafalgar wasn't till 1805 and Waterloo wasn't till 1815... There's still 15 years of proud conflict to cover... some of the best some might say. I agree... things were much more amusing when we were always falling out instead of building silly tunnels and bickering over sheep transports. Let's sod this EU pants and start a war over one of the smaller EU countries... or perhaps a colony somewhere... A far more civilised form of combat.

Oh, god yes this is LESS lethal than rubber bullets... but to claim that is "without risk of injury" is absolutely ridiculous. The risk is far less than other systems, and way way within acceptable levels... but c'mon... do they seriously believe people will accept that it is "without risk of injury" when its functionality relies on it penetrating your body? PS, Israel has in the past considered a bullet fired at the ground so it ricochets into its target within the proper definition of a "rubber" bullet. I've long wanted something like a fully auto BB gun adapted for use in riot control. (I'm talking 6mm plastic ball bearings propelled by a little motor in case there's a language barrier). Having been shot many times by BB guns I know I wouldn't hang arround when I'm being hit by a few dozen a second of those little buggers. Sure you might take the odd eye out if you're not super careful... Fuckers shouldn't be rioting in the first place. Much cheaper - and they don't have to penetrate your skin to get rid of you. Slightly different application that this weapon though as a fully auto BB gun would really only be good for dispursing riots, not taking down individuals.

Yes, very cool... but: Really? Anything that involves fireing a missile at someone designed to penetrate their flesh MUST have at least a RISK of death and by definition it is an injury. That's a nice idea too.

Hey, I eat raw bush... you mean you guys cook your bush before you eat it? edit: Did I read the title wrong.... ?

Some people worry me.

In that same vein the Safire II is fully-elliptical but only lightly so, thus generally placed in the semi-elliiptical class.

Hah! Now I'm in London, at Skreamer's place! - 'Come' to our Vibe Boogie...

They remind me of Murphy's laws of combat. Ones that spring to mind that are of immediate relevance: 1Never forget that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder. 2When in doubt, empty your magazine. 3The more a weapon costs, the farther you will have to send it away to be repaired. 4The complexity of a weapon is inversely proportional to the IQ of the weapon's operator.

It might surprise you how many of us are fighting to make sure that it remains simply something we do and not something we are. As great as skydiving is, if you let anything become so all consuming as that then you run the risk of missing out on the rest of life. Find a balance.

THAT's why I drive a two seater!

tehee, which claims neg do you work for? Might explain why I'm having a hard time with some companies at the moment.

As an exercise in physics or out of interest it's a cool idea. Not sure if it has an application to safty or in judging what people are ready to jump. I think you're off to a good start, but as highlighted above, the equation needs to be much much longer. There are just so many variables in this sport.

Effectively you won't - canopies are ground hungry, they're angled down as if they want to fly into the ground. How many times have you been able to actually climb back up during a normal parachute decent?

Nice Tits.

Same here - got an e-mail yesterday pushing delivery back 2-3 weeks. I've promised to send the bad suits back for them to see where they're going wrong. As I said, if they can sort their problems out they are quite capable of producing top quality merchandise... it's just their quality control which is in issue at the moment.

Soviet 7.62 is shorter and much less powerful than NATO 7.62. The Soviet round has similar ballistic characteristics to the NATO 5.56 round in that it's shit for accuracy and tumbles at distance or after initial impact. The logic was that in a big war between the two super powers the majority of combatants would be less well trained and thus accuracy would be moot anyway. The average range over which a battle is fought is short so it doesn't matter if the round is inaccurate at long range. A tumbling round causes more damage to a target than a straight fling one. In fact the 5.56 round is designed from the ground up to only just have enough energy to keep it stable in flight... the moment it impacts with it's target it is designed to tumble and create a large exit wound. A more powerful round may simply fly straight through the target and actually impart less kinetic energy. For this reason it tends to start to tumble after only a few hundred feet when its energy starts to bleed off. Soviets took all this theory even one step further and their standard round at the close of the cold war was supposed to be the 5.45x39mm as adopted in the AK74 which takes the downsizing trend even further than NATO did. As I’ve said though, none of the theory really holds true anymore for modern requirements. It’s just that it’s always tough to change established military doctrine. A modern army is small and well trained. We need to kill before we are killed and we need to do it at a distance so that we don’t send home boxes draped in flags. This calls for a larger, more accurate round and the 5.56 simply doesn’t cut it. Going big means weight which means sacrificing ammo – but generals don’t want to do that. So go caseless – that’s where a lot of the weight is… but the technology needs work. Metalstorm is not really a development in caseless ammo. It’s simply taking existing big gun technology going miniature and stacking them on top of each other. Remember big guns don't have cartridges - they have a shell and a charge, just like metalstorm. There's also nothing new in having more than one round in the chamber. There were weapons developed like this in the early 1800’s to solve the rate of fire issues which dogged weapons of that era. Such weapons could be loaded with half a dozen rounds and had separate percussion nipples down the barrel and a sliding hammer action. They were of course little more than a curiosity - too heavy and dificult to operate for the battle field and little demand for a high rate of fire in the civilian world. The main problem with citing Metalstorm as an example is that it does not address the biggest issue of caseless ammo: the handling and loading by a mechanical system of inherently less robust ammunition. That is the real challenge, and it is one that is most likely going to be solved by chemists as opposed to engineers.

You can pic up the sony lens you speek of on e-bay for as little as $20 second hand. I bought a brand new one earlier this year for $30... it arrived with a price sticker saying $80 on it. Although it says it's a 0.6 it weighs in at about a 0.43 ish depending on what you compare it against. It's certainly much wider than the numbers would suggest.

I’m afraid you’re gonna have to live with the concept of electronically fired weapons on board ships. Think about what happens on a modern warship when it comes under attack: The electronic radar detects an incoming missile and electronically displays it as an electronic blip on the electric radar screen. The radar operator keys his electric mic and an officer hears him speak on his electric headphones. The officer gives orders to attack the missile and someone pushes some electric buttons. Electronic signals get sent to the ships defence systems. Say the missile’s close – the ships electronic target acquisition computer chooses Phalanx and sends an electronic message to the weapon to power up its electric motors. Phalanx electronically communicates with the ships electric defence computer, which uses information electrically gathered from the ships electric radar system to compute the missiles path in its complicated electric brain. It electronically communicates this back to Phalanx so that I knows where to aim. Phalanx’s electric motors whir into action and point its multi-barrelled gun in the right direction before it spits a hail of fire in the direction of its target. Its multiple barrels spin with the aid of an electric motor. It continues to track its target across the sky, aided continuously by electronic communications between it and the ships defence computer and its electronically powered motors. The story is little changed if it’s a ship 10 miles away we’re shooting at, or if the incoming missile is detected much earlier and we’re able to shoot at it with our own electronically launched missiles (no blue touch paper there). Face it – ships are covered in electrics and they have been for years. The days when a ships primary defence system was a guy stood at a railing with a manually fired gun aimed with some crosshairs and a team bringing him ammo by hand are long long gone.

You should then ask them to do the same to another skydiver that they know so it has a ripple effect throughout the sport. Kind of like some safty chain letter... only not quite so gay.

I went to some riggers at a US DZ and asked about attaching a Benchmade rescue knife to my rig. I spent about half an hour going over different ideas with 3 riggers. We decided as a group that it probably there wasn't a great risk/benefit equation to mounting this knife on a rig. Not for me at least. We concluded that the ridges on the back edge of the knife had sharp edges that were tantamount to a saw at certain angles. Thus this knife if simply attached with the head in a pocket (as are most) could either wear on my rig through friction or could, for example during a collision, cut another's rig quite badly in only one motion. I'm not saying an ad-hoc "symposium" of 2 jumpers and 3 riggers is better than that of an entire rig manufacturing company (I know these are being given away as standard with a certain new rig), I'm just conveying the concerns we had about the knife.

Ok - to go back to the “versions” of this story that I highlighted earlier... Does everyone agree that the first scenario would be a pretty clear-cut account of self-defence for which the woman should not be chastised? Does everyone agree that the second scenario requires further investigation, not necessarily punishment at this point, but at least a deeper look to see exactly what happened and when and under what circumstances? IF those two are agreed by all, (I don’t pretend for a minute that they will be) the only thing that is really being argued about is exactly what happened – whether it’s scenario A or scenario B. Now we here do not know exactly what happened that day.

Most common places are: Chest strap (pull down to remove) Either leg strap (above hardware friction adapter) Either mudflap (generally requires a rigger to fit a male press-stud/popper) Leg of jump suit (integrated pouch) Upper arm of jump suit (integrated pouch) Consider where your arms might be if you’re wrapped up in someone else’s lines. Consider how you might need to reach a knife with either hand as the other may be trapped. Practice finding your knife without looking.

He's also pointed out that what most people would initially assume to be a very serious and possibly life threatening injury (fractured skull) could in fact be quite minor. They can be - a hair line fracture - still a "fracture" but can be caused by only a minor impact. A fracture of the orbital floor (eye socket - recieved by many if not most recipients of a black eye) is still a fracture of the skull. The term in itself is virtually meaninless... My point is, none of us know how serious her injuries were... we are not going to be able to make judgement calls on her actions because we can't guage how badly effected she was by her injuries.

Guys, you’re not gonna be able to win a shouting match over what her injuries were. Yes, she REPORTEDLY had a fractured skull – that could be a very minor injury or a very serious injury. Posters to a message board can not tell how severe it was because they are not doctors who have had the opportunity to examine her. Quit arguing a point you neither of you can win.