HelixDab2

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

It is, honestly, not nearly as bad as you'd think. The weight should be pretty well distributed, armor doesn't have to be all that heavy to stop a sword, and the gambeson is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for piercing weapons. Blunt weapons, well, those are going to be unpleasant pretty much no matter what. You get really hot though; there's a reason that the Saracens did such a number on the crusaders when they were able to get them outside of cities.

Wearing a plate carrier is, IMO, worse than wearing a gambeson and chain maille.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

Unfortunately, this one goes both ways. Some women feel like they need to play hard to get, because otherwise they're sluts, and also they want to know that a guy really likes her. It's self defeating of course, on both sides.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

What's crazy is that, for all the poundage that a war bow requires to pull, it's still less powerful than a small-caliber bullet. A breastplate will easily stop a clothyard arrow with a hardened bodkin point, and a .38 Spl will blow right through. I tried doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations a while back, and IIRC a .22LR has more energy at the muzzle of a 14" rifle barrel than a 160# bow could put into an arrow. (Someone needs to double check my math on that though.)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Blackhawk Down gets things very right.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Sword fight? Fanning at each other, crossing and smacking swords.

Just watch Olympic fencing; you get a very fast exchange that you can't follow, and then someone has a point. In a real sword fight, without armor, that's about what would happen. OTOH, when everyone is wearing armor, it gets a lot messier.

And of course, the classic gunfight where nobody hits anything.

That is surprisingly common. Most people are really bad shots when they're stressed out. It's physiological; when your body dumps adrenaline into your bloodstream, you lose fine motor control. So unless you've trained extensively under stressful conditions, you're gonna have a hard time doing shit.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Ooooo! Can I play?

Let's say that you have a pro-genocide Republican, a pro-genocide Democrat, and an anti-genocide 3rd party candidate, but the anti-genocide candidate also wants to give all school children machine guns and grenades, and require cars to intentionally run down pedestrians?

Or or or let's say that the anti-genocide candidate's campaign is so bad that her own party is telling her drop out? .

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Most people in the military do a basic qualification that is pretty easy to pass (23/49 targets, at ranges from 25 to 300m); these aren't head shots, these are just on the target. Once you've done that, and graduated from basic, depending on your specialty, you may rarely touch a rifle. Lots of former military people think that they're good, just because they managed a single qualification, and that they know a lot about guns, but it's often just fudd-lore. Spec ops guys and Marines tend to be more proficient overall, because they spend more time practicing. (TBH, a lot of the spec ops are very mediocre as far as competitive shooting goes, but they have a lot of other skills that are relevant to the military, and tend to refuse to give up.) Cops are often even worse; their qualifications are at short distances, with very lenient time standards.

Bear in mind that the kill-to-bullet ratio in Afghanistan was about 1:300,000; most shooting in the modern military is suppressive, rather than directed at a specific target.

Compare that to someone that's a USPSA B class shooter, or someone that regularly shoots PCSL 2 gun matches; they will tend to outshoot a lot of retired military, because they tend to practice, and practice on a shot timer, a lot.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Where o where is UniversalMonk when you want to shove something in his smarmy, trollish face...?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago

Without claiming outright magic [...]

...We're still talking about zombies, right? Animated corpses that have an overwhelming need to consume human flesh, and can only be killed with overwhelming brain damage? I'm pretty sure that's the definition of magic right there. If you're talking about something like the cordyceps fungi--which, to infect humans, would still need some kind of magical power--you still have a very, very finite limit on how long a 'human' will survive (about four weeks without food, give or take), so you should be able to just wait them out, rather than needing to proactively kill them.

That zombie horde will be a lot less dangerous and easy to clean up once it’s crawling on the ground with all the speed of a toddler.

Less dangerous, yes. Not not dangerous, depending on which version of zombies you're talking about specifically.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

You haven't shot with people that were in the military, have you? :P

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I thought that they still used them for destroying some munitions? Like, those burn pits in Iraq that caused so many cases of cancer? IDK.

You can quite legally buy them in the US though. They're pricey, but, hey, you never know, right?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

You'd still need to hit each zombie individually though.

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