Zeropoint

A quick look at a Google image search tells me that percussion caps have at most a 1.5:1 depth to diameter ratio, AND many of them have split or corrugated sides, both of which will make the drawing process easier. In contrast, cartridge cases start at about that ratio and move up to maybe 6:1, and they need to be made with smooth, continuous sides. I can imagine a culture having the tech to draw percussion cap bodies but not the skill to reliably draw proper cartridge cases. However, such a situation couldn't persist very long unless you had a very small population of inventors and/or remarkably slow diffusion of ideas. Brass is commonly acknowledged among reloaders to be the most expensive component of a cartridge on a cost-to-purchase basis . . . but also the cheapest part on a cost-per-shot basis, because of how many times it can be reused. It's also the part that requires the largest industrial base to produce. Cartridge cases in good condition would indeed be highly valued until your society has returned to a post-industrial-revolution economy.

With straight-walled cases like most pistol ammunition, the most likely mode of case failure is splitting lengthwise. This can lead to difficult extraction but in a revolver is unlikely to cause much other trouble. Having a case split in a semi-automatic could cause a jam, if it won't extract properly. Bottleneck cartridges have it worse, because they can fail by having the front of the cartridge break off and stay in the chamber, and that will put the gun out of operation until you get it out. If you're really unlucky, the next round will get firmly stuck.

Sorry to be unclear; I served in the Reactor Controls Division of an aircraft carrier. I am very definitely too big for subs, and that's why I didn't volunteer for sub service.

To further complicate matters, rank is to some extent relative rather than absolute. For example, thanks to being a nuke, I got to my ship as an Electronics Technician Third Class (that is, a Petty Officer Third Class (pay grade E4) with a rating of "Electronics Technician") which is a low (the lowest) Non-Commissioned Officer rank. In some parts of the military, that rank would have entitled me to be in command of a small number of other service members. In my work center, everyone else ALSO got to the ship as an E4, so it was the lowest rank we had and the bottom of the totem pole. If there was unpleasant work to be done, NCOs were doing it. I got out as an E6, but I was never in charge of anything, and despite being the same rank as my immediate supervisor, I still had to follow his orders. Ah, I'm so glad I got out.

Objectively speaking, the rovers are inanimate objects with no opinions or feelings, and no moral agency. And yet, I completely agree with you. If not for the sake of the rovers, then to show to ourselves and our descendants our regard for the qualities the rovers have so gloriously demonstrated. Those rovers are heroes, and deserve heroes' honors--if not for themselves, then for what they mean to us.

Wait, Australia wants to ship undesirable people off to another land mass? Criminals, perhaps? Do they see the irony?

You know, I realize that this won't come as a surprise, given my avatar, but I'm really not feeling very fond of capitalism right now. <wanders off looking for a Pony Music Video of The Internationale>

You know, I would really say that Teddy and Abe belong in the first picture. I REALLY have a hard time picturing Military-Serving, National-Park-Making, Trust-Busting Teddy Roosevelt being pals with Trump. And YES, I understand that these paintings are done on a Democrat/Republican split; it's just that the modern Republican Party is NOT "the party of Lincoln". The party has changed over the years.

My take on it is that Hero is not fine-grained enough to realistically represent the differences between sword styles in game-mechanical terms. Honestly, I'm not sure a game that finicky would even be fun to play as an RPG. As a stand-alone combat simulator, maybe, along the lines of Toribash, it could be interesting.

Oh, in THAT case it's easy. You just store all the characters you're not using in quantum non-observational limbo until they're relevant to the story, at which point they spring back into full existence when the camera points at them.

Well, in the US Navy, they do it by having "cleaning stations" every morning, where everyone not on watch spends an hour cleaning their work spaces, berthing spaces, and the passageways outside them. It's taken as given that sailors need to have tons of busywork to do.

I've got one word for you: lithobraking.

Yep. That's one of the reasons I am no longer a fan of our Boys in Black.

As far as I can tell, you're correct. Cowering outside and waiting for the shooter to finish and come out is not the optimal strategy for saving lives . . . at least not the lives that the cops are supposedly sworn to serve and protect.

So, apparently I can't figure out how to work the web site and I messed up a post. My recent post of the "Die For Metal" PMV to the "In Other News" thread was supposed to have text in it but I put the video link in first and then couldn't figure out how to add text. Now, even when I try to reply to that thread and add some words in another post, the video pops up in the text entry area and I can't work out how to put in any text. And so, I would like to humbly request that a mod either 1) add the text "They can't stop us; let 'em try!" before the video (and if you could make it less huge, maybe?) or 2) just remove the post altogether, since I don't have anything to say beyond "oh, I like metal, too".

I'm inclined to agree with Lord Liaden and Ragitsu on this. However, I'm a gun owner myself, and so a reader could reasonably suspect my views to be biased. Still, to me, guns are fun dangerous toys, cool and interesting machines, and neat pieces of history you can own. The idea of someone seeing a gun as some sort of token of manliness and power . . . I remember years ago seeing someone who seemed to feel that way about holding a pellet gun, and it was unsettling. I've met someone who's impulse on holding a decorative sword was to hold it near my neck. There are people who have pathological responses to possessing weapons, and since it doesn't seem to happen as much in other countries, I blame elements of our culture.

It would be relatively easy to secure schools against active shooters, but it wouldn't be convenient. You'd need to make the schools actual secure zones, rather than just going through security theater. The first step would be limited access: surrounding the school property with at the very least chainlink fence topped with razor wire, and allowing ingress/egress only through security checkpoints. An actual wall with razor wire would be better, since you can get through a chainlink fence pretty easily if you come prepared. The other component would be making those security entrances impossible to get through by unauthorized personnel, and that's where the big slowdown comes in. You'd need armed guards for sure, and probably an "airlock" style setup where people are physically prevented from entering unless actively buzzed in by a guard who's watching from a position not vulnerable to gunfire. Obviously anyone coming in would have to go through a metal detector. Such a system would make the school safe, but there are three obvious problems. First, it would take a long time to filter an entire school's worth of students and staff through it. Second, it would cost a lot of money to equip all the nation's schools that way. Finally, it would make the schools look an awful lot like a prison.

As soon as I saw it, I knew that it was either microscopic or geographic in scale, but not which. I find that intriguing. Why is "not human scale" obvious to us when the difference between tiny and huge isn't? Is it just familiarity with what things look like at our own scale? Something to do with fractals in nature (but wouldn't THAT lead to similarities at ALL scales?)?

Surely in this internet connected era, it should be the Year of the Doge. Many Zodiac. Such Lunar. Wow.

Interesting. I have questions, though, like why the extreme curve, and was the file really that wide? I keep thinking about getting into making knives, but never doing anything about it.

That's how it works for ants, and no one says that ants aren't an evolutionary success.

I choose to believe this is a cute and intimate film about Liam Neeson as an engineer giving emotional support to an anthropomorphic train working up the courage to be open about its sexuality.

The formula for the contest does NOT preclude the usual stakes of the genre, it just requires that those things not happen to WOMEN. A book in which a MAN is "beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered" would qualify for the contest, and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work as a thriller.