Silicon Valley Redneck

Attention to detail

I can't help thinking there's something wrong with this picture.

Srsly?

Oh, look: another misplaced decimal point!

Spotted here:

They mounted a main battery of five dual-purpose 5-inch, .38 caliber guns

I said that was an ambiguous phrase, didn't I?

New! Proprietary! Uh...

Randomly following links, I encounter this phrase:

the full-size and compact models feature a new proprietary rotating barrel breech to provide lockup

Hmmm.  Rotating barrel lockup.  Colt, 2000?  Steyr, 1912?  Savage, 1907?

And I assume the name of the product, Px4, is pronounced "Pee-by-four."  Right?  Or did no one in Marketing run it by any 'Murricans?

Silly caption error

CDR Salamander is having a caption contest.

The official caption includes this bit:

Sailors clean the MK-45 5-inch/.54-caliber lightweight gun

Er.  Misplaced decimal point?  A 5-inch, .54-caliber gun would be a large-bore pistol with a 5" long barrel.  What they're cleaning appears to be more of an artillery piece with a 5"×54 = 270" long barrel.

The classic example of this ambiguous terminology is of course the five-inch, thirty-eight-caliber gun, which, as spoken, could reasonably be parsed either way.

In the days of lace-ruffles, perukes, and brocade...

Quoth Iain Thomson in El Reg:

But the Sandia system is unusual in that it relies on a smooth bore barrel to fire the projectile, rather than the rifled guns used for the last few hundred years

Er... last few hundred?  This from a Brit?  (A Brit reporting from San Francisco, but still.)  History, man, history!

 

Pigs 9; British bipeds 4.

Late lunch hour was time to watch some Mythbusters; today, the "tossing pigs out of helicopters" edition.

As is often the case, I'm bothered by their treatment of the main myth: "It's sometimes possible to dodge a bullet fired at a distance" somehow morphed into "It's sometimes possible to dodge a bullet fired at a distance from a modern sniper rifle."

The results might have been very different if they'd used a different bullet-flanger.  A Trapdoor Springfield, say, or Brown Bess, or even a .44 Magnum with a high-muzzle-flash load, rather than the latest high-velocity, low-signature technology.

And you'd think, after the pig toss, they'd have headed off into the sunset talking about making sausage....