Sure, but my point was just that this shouldn't really be any worse than the vast majority of modern assault rifles, which have similar barrel lengths (in fact, the new QBZ-191 rifle that's replacing the 95 has exactly a 14.5″ barrel in its standard configuration). If you're shooting with the muzzle close to a wall (or a bench as in your example) it's not going to be nice, but you'll have the same problem with most other modern rifles.

The barrel's apparently supposed to be around 14.5 inches, so it really shouldn't be much worse than like an M4. It just looks really short since it's a bullpup.

The muzzle devices are I assume similar in design to the AKS-74U muzzle booster, which seems to be decently effective (of course, since the 74U is so short, even the reduced muzzle blast is still excessive, but this QBZ has an extra 6.4 inches of barrel, which should help a lot)

yeah, I was thinking about linking that video when I was making the post, but I forgot

there's also a Forgotten Weapons video that goes in more depth

https://x.com/ArmchairW/status/1831176695589618060

Could [the Europeans] reopen the Bab al-Mandeb without US assistance?

After all, right now the Western mission in the Bab al-Mandeb is run by the EU as EUNAVFOR Aspides, so they're already in charge of the area of operations. Reopening the straits will require ground troops to land and occupy enough currently Houthi-held territory to prevent drone and missile launches at maritime traffic transiting the strait. Can the EU muster the force? Power projection requires amphibious assault ships and aircraft carriers. Four European navies operate these capital ships: the UK, France, Italy and Spain. Between them they have four aircraft carriers worth the name (Cavour, Charles de Gaulle, Queen Elizabeth, and Prince of Wales) and eight amphibious assault ships of note (Giuseppe Garibaldi, Juan Carlos I, Galicia, Castilla, Mistral, Tonnere, Dixmude, Albion, and Bulwark). The Italians additionally operate three very small amphibs of the San Giorgio-class. Many of these ships are in some kind of reduced readiness or maintenance status. Realistically the European Union could deploy on a "surge" basis two carriers (with a weaker combined air wing than a single USN carrier) and a single amphibious group comparable to a USN Amphibious Ready Group. This sealift capability would support landing a brigade-size element in Yemen.

The Europeans also maintain a sizable number of airborne formations (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain all have brigade-plus or -minus elements standing and aren't faced with fighting Russia on short notice), and can field about 100 heavy transport aircraft, mostly A400s. Based on RAND corporation analysis (link in the first post) it would take approximately 105 C-17 sorties to deliver one US infantry brigade with appropriate enablers for a high-end battle. Yemen will be a high-end battle. Although an A400 can jump about the same number of paratroopers as a C-17, it can carry only about half the cargo. Ergo, something like 150 A400 sorties would be required to deliver one brigade, not to mention ongoing sustainment requirements. As it's doubtful more than 30 or so aircraft would be (or even could be, I'm not going to try to analyze ramp space in Djibouti) committed to the operation, the EU task force could realistically only jump a single fully-equipped brigade into Yemen alongside the amphibious landing.

Barring military access from Saudi Arabia or Oman, these two European brigades are going to have to hit the dirt and seize a seaport (perhaps the city of Al Hudaydah, shown) to allow conventional shipping to come in and "administratively" deliver what's going to be a pretty meager follow-on force. That entails a city fight. Even with a seized airport and light reinforcements beyond the initial brigade flowing in by air (alongside much of their logistical requirements!), that's a tall order - particularly given the Houthis have real anti-access/area-denial capabilities and a reasonably competent army. Two or three European brigades in the Middle East, with a mission to seize a major urban area, relying on sketchy air support and tenuous supply lines, can get into a lot of trouble in 2024. Al Hudaydah, for instance, is a Houthi stronghold with a population of close to three-quarters of a million. A smarter course of action may be to enter in non-Houthi controlled eastern Yemen, establish logistics and attack from the east - but it'll be much slower to open the straits and oh, by the way, will require those aforementioned logistics to travel around the Horn of Africa because the Bab al-Mandeb will remain closed in the interim. So the indirect approach is fraught with its own, very significant, issues.

Which brings me to the crux of the problem - Yemen is a big country. It's somewhat larger than Iraq and has about 3/4 the population. The vast majority of that population lives in areas controlled by the Houthis. And, most importantly, the Houthis are very competent fighters. Ergo, even a minimal operation to reopen the Bab al-Mandeb should be expected to be something more on the scale of the 2003 invasion of Iraq than the sort of African bandit-chasing expedition we've seen European forces actually perform in recent memory. And the EU doesn't remotely have the capability to deploy and sustain forces at that level. The force that overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003 was 200,000-strong - an order of magnitude or more larger than what I've described above.

So to answer my starting question: No. Not a chance. In fact it would be a significant operation even for the United States - certainly not something that could be done quickly, easily, or with the commitment of minimal forces.

The only thing I could find was https://guns.fandom.com/wiki/Heckler_%26_Koch_NBW

I assume caseless is just too niche for pistols - even if you developed it, without a major military adopting it, it just wouldn't have enough traction for anyone to switch from what they're already using it, and for militaries pistols are a relatively low priority weapon so they wouldn't bother with anything particularly groundbreaking

Not sure, the demos I've played are pretty vague about the lore. I think the devs are Polish, so who knows.

Yeah, this is just how it was labeled on the antiques site where I found it, but I also thought it was weird for it to be labeled a Bowie. Although for the clip point specifically, that doesn't seem to be absolutely necessary - there are bowies with more conventional blades, these days they're often referred to as "Arkansas Toothpicks" just to better distinguish them, but in the actual historical period the two terms seem to have been used interchangeably.

Still, this one seems too small - but it could also be a situation where the American and English definitions simply differ

"The West, so afraid of strong government, now has no government. Only financial power" has got to be one of my favorite lines,

it's in German - Sicher for safe, Einzelfeuer (single-fire) for semi-auto, and Feuerstoss (which apparently translates to "burst of fire", but I'm pretty sure this is still a full-auto setting, it's just that "burst" in English fire selectors is often assumed to mean "limited burst" (to 2-3 rounds usually))

Is this about the bit above the trigger? That's the fire selector, safe—semi-automatic—fully-automatic, with the later two being marked in red to indicate danger I guess

either he doesn't see this as a negotiation (in which case he has a middle-school understanding of civics and should get the fuck off his high horse about it)

He doesn't even understand the most basic facts about the legal system in question - he was going on about "b-but what if it sets a bad precedent"... the EU does not use fucking common law (completely, now that the Brits are out). They don't give a shit about precedents (well, at least they give less of a shit than a common law system would)!

Yeah, some of these don't fit so well. Metro isn't open-world either (at least until Exodus, and I guess that's more semi-open: still a linear sequence of levels, just with some of them being larger and more open), Tarkov I think had some ambitions for being open-world but that hasn't happened yet (and probably never will given how that game's development is going), and I'm not sure how well This War Of Mine fits into what people typically envision as the open-world framework.

A few of these should probably be swapped out with the Witcher 1&2, and maybe Boiling Point as a more obscure entry. Or just the "open-world features" part be removed from the description.

From what I know, there's a distinction between dao (刀) and jian (劍) - the first for single-edged blades (sometimes translated into English as "saber", due to a similar connotation), and the second for double-edged ones.

I guess in modern Chinese the word has evolved to just refer to knives, rather than swords.

It's just another symptom of the games industry continuing to seek prestige and mainstream approval by aping existing artforms like film. It's disappointing, but I guess it's working out pretty well for them (apparently there's no greater sign that you've "made it" as a work of art than getting a TV show adaption )

a little bit of analysis about Kursk

The only thing I'd want to add to Mikael's excellent analysis here is that the Russians are actually fighting a much more conventional area defense than we've seen in the very static fighting in the Donbass. They're not trying to stop Ukrainian drives at the screen line like we saw in the Hundred Days, they're instead diverting them into engagement areas between their front line of screening troops and the main defensive line 5-10km to the rear and destroying them there. Ergo why we've seen Ukrainian units just go on these long runs in the last couple days - way past where the front line should be - and then get wiped out in what look like complex ambushes. That's... actually just how you do a very normal area defense.

Why have the Russians changed tactics? Two reasons. First, in Kursk they - paradoxically - have space to fight. The Donbass is a cramped theater where real estate is at an absolute premium. They're either backing up into the sea, key lines of communication, or critical urban areas there. There's actual operational space in rural Kursk. Second and relatedly, the "forward" defense we're used to seeing in the Donbass will not inflict crippling casualties on an attacker quickly for the simple reason that attacks often fail in the "cone of fire" in no man's land or even behind the attacker's front line, allowing defeated units to easily withdraw. In a conventional defense the attacker is defeated in a kill zone behind the screen line and it is far easier to annihilate an attacking force. Ergo why we're now seeing huge AFU equipment losses, with entire Ukrainian companies burning out behind the ostensible Russian "front."

Having found themselves in battle with the AFU's strategic reserves, the Russians now very much intend to use the Battle of Sudzha-Korenevo to destroy as much of those reserves as possible. Even if that means scaring some war mappers on the internet.

tbf, apparently Borderlands was mostly filmed before Tár - it was just in development hell for so long that it released years after

advanced warfighters will join the war

damn, they're sending Ghost Recon in? Tom Clancy's™ Ghost Recon™© Advanced Warfighter™®?

Sort of - there were different terms adopted by different countries. Submachine gun was an American term, while machine pistol was used by the Germans, Soviets (as пистолет-пулемёт) and French (as Pistolet Mitrailleur). The Brits had their own preferred term, machine carbine. The confusing part is that later on, machine pistol was also adopted as a term in American usage, except to refer to a specific subtype of submachine gun (in the most literal sense, just pistols that can shoot in full-auto, like the Stechkin, but also more broadly, really compact SMGs that have a form factor comparable to a pistol).

The StG-44 originally being called an MP was just a trick by the designers, since Hitler was initially opposed to it, so in order to keep developing it they just pretended that they were working on a regular SMG to replace the MP-40, and once it was accepted into service they redesignated it to Sturmgewehr. Interestingly, before the Maschinenpistole designation trick, the earliest prototypes were actually called Maschinenkarabiner - the same term the British used (except the Brits used it for guns in pistol-calibers, while the Germans already had Maschinenpistole for them, so Maschinenkarabiner now referred to automatic stuff in a bigger caliber).

So yeah, there's definitely a bunch of confusing stuff about the terminology - part of the problem is that the focus on the "machine" part made sense when the vast majority of weapons were bolt-action rifles, so having something self-loading was a big deal, and it had to be distinguished from regular guns. But when the vast majority of infantry weapons become self-loading, technically they're all some kind of machine something.

The "sub" just refers to it being smaller and less powerful than a proper machine gun, but the term is definitely rather vague about the precise point when something shifts from machine gun to submachine gun. And of course, with the later introduction of assault rifles, you now have something sitting between submachine guns and regular machine guns, so the "sub" part kind of doesn't mean anything anymore. People have mostly settled on using submachine gun to refer to fully-automatic weapons in a pistol caliber, but that's not something that's immediately obvious from the term itself

Yeah, this is in a full-power cartridge, 8×50mm - it would be completely uncontrollable and impractical, hence why it never went past the prototype stage.

However, at this point in time, people were still figuring out the definitions, so the pistol-caliber as a requirement hadn't really set in yet - I assume the designers of this one literally meant "machine gun but small" (hence the sub- prefix)

I don't think it's necessarily related to the Sterling, but rather they both (and many other submachine guns, like the Sten, M3, Beretta M12, etc.) get their "shape" from a common source - the manufacturing simplicity of tubular receivers. Making a receiver like that work with a gas-operated gun is a bit trickier, since there needs to be some space for the piston to go, but with delayed blowback you can just have the bolt in a relatively cylindrically-shaped bolt carrier that fits snugly into a tube.

Here's an StG-45, which doesn't actually quite have a tubular receiver (since there's a rectangular portion at the bottom, it's overall more like a "keyhole" shape I guess), but it's just to demonstrate how the internals of a delayed blowback gun can look

I think it's mostly for weight reduction (with minimal loss of strength), although there could also be aesthetic considerations in some cases

Russia is now fighting a war of attrition and way better positioned for it than Ukraine but it wasn't their intention and it took months for them to swallow the fact that it was gonna be necessary (hence the mobilisation only coming months after).

Yes - and now that they have shifted to attrition, why would they be in a hurry to end things?

You wrote in your original comment that "Politically this will have given western support for Ukraine a shot in the arm which is the opposite of what Russia needs if it wants to end the war sooner rather than later", but if Russia has accepted the framing of this being an attritional conflict, why would they "[want] to end the war sooner rather than later"? And thus, why would this be "embarassing", rather than just the plan to attrit Ukraine continuing on? You can't attrit the enemy if you don't actually fight them.

like sorry but this is just revisionism of what happened in 2022

I don't disagree that Russia's original strategy was maybe naive (although I also disagree with the framing people have of assuming Russia didn't have, you know, a plan B - to me, the drive towards Kiev was just an opportunistic "if it works, it works" move, with a more conventional attritional plan to fall back on otherwise; there's also other strategic considerations beyond just taking the capital)- but they're not fighting according to that strategy anymore, so what is its relevance exactly? Yeah, sure, we can criticize them for taking so long to adapt - but they have adapted. Like, this is the kind of thinking that causes Westerners to think Finland won the Winter War, because the Soviets happened to underperform, even though they actually achieved all of their strategic objectives, and more. Could the Soviets have carried out the campaign better and with less casualties? Maybe, but we can argue about counterfactuals all day long. Did they win? Uh, yes!

western support for Ukraine a shot in the arm

With what equipment, from what factory? The West can talk about support all they want, but the material reality of a crumbling industrial base doesn't care.

the opposite of what Russia needs if it wants to end the war sooner rather than later

Why are we assuming Russia wants to end the war sooner? Like, I keep seeing people act as it's some great failure for the war to drag on, but I just don't get it - the strategic goal Russia has set for itself is demilitarizing Ukraine, and the longer the war drags on, the more equipment is destroyed (and that can't keep being replenished forever, since Western countries have already given a lot of what they could and their efforts to push the "industrialize" button have amounted to fuck all, while conversely Russia's military industry is doing very well), and more importantly (and gruesomely, but war is hell for a reason), the more Ukrainians die, ensuring less of a capacity to resist in the future.

The whole "fast war good" is an entirely Western conception, and nothing at all to do with the Soviet/Russian attritional way of war. We have two very good case studies disputing the "fast war good" standpoint - WW2, and the US invasion of Iraq. In WW2, towards the end there were Nazi plans to carry on a guerilla resistance after their defeat, which amounted to very little in reality - because by that point, most of the able-bodied (and sufficiently radicalized) men who could become insurgents were either dead or captured, so there was essentially no-one left to be a brave resistance fighter. In contrast, bandit and partisan groups kept troubling the Soviets in the Baltics, Poland and Ukraine until the 50s and early 60s, because there actually was a manpower pool (and Western support) for such groups to draw from.

So, a slow, grueling war certainly isn't nice to fight, but it ensured the enemy is actually defeated for good (well, that didn't quite work out in Germany's case, since a lot of those captured soldiers were captured by the Allies - who proceeded to release them, including many who were on trial for war crimes, and basically re-activate the Wehrmacht under a new name in the name of anti-communism - which I guess shows the war should have been even more grueling, with the Soviets fighting through all of Germany and ensuring such trickery doesn't happen, but that wasn't necessarily a viable option).

Iraq, on the other hand, demonstrates the other extreme - an incredibly rapid and bloodless (for the invaders, anyway) war, one which Western military commentators insist perfectly illustrates the superiority of NATO doctrine over the Soviet one. This narrative works, of course, only if you pretend history ends with the fall of Baghdad, and completely ignore the years of brutal counter-insurgency that followed. Now, could these things that happened after one another, perhaps be... connected? Could it be that the Coalition's rapid victory, in fact completely failed to "demilitarize" Iraq - and that, combined with the later mismanagement by the occupying administration, ensured an insurgency that had a large pool of resources and disgruntled men to draw from?

If Russia had won the war quickly, with most of the Ukrainian neo-nazi paramilitaries still intact instead of rotting in trenches across the country, they'd have had a brutal insurgency on their hands - one which Western countries would have a great time supporting. Instead, they now get to watch Ukraine feed its population and millions of dollars worth of Western equipment into the meat grinder. It's a brutal outlook, yes, but it's clearly militarily effective, if morally dubious.

That's the shamshir, the tulwar/talwar is Indian. Although of course these categories are kind of arbitrary - both weapons belong to the same extended family of "scimitars", and have various degrees of commonality. From what I know, tulwars are mostly identified by their unique hilt, and tend to have less-curved blades than the shamshir, but of course there's going to be some level of variation between different examples.

Yes, a "maker's mark" - a signature of a blacksmith. Although it might just be for the blade rather than the sword as whole, you sometimes have blades that were later re-hilted.

Grenade launchers definitely add a bunch of weight - I'm not sure what this model is exactly, but the M203 for example is 1.36 kg, the grenades themselves vary based on the specific model, but let's say around 0.25 kg per round. The vz. 58 is a 2.91 kg rifle, so that's over half the weight of the full rifle, hanging off the front.

That's why you don't just issue a grenade launcher to each guy in the squad, but you usually have a designated "grenadier" who gets to lug around the heavier rifle, and you also carry the launcher unloaded and only put in the grenade right before firing.

It depends on how short - one of the problems with cutting down barrels is that you increase the muzzle blast (since a bunch of the generated hot gases, rather than expending their energy pushing the bullet forward, now just go out into the open air and explosively burn up). It's why these days short-barreled builds are often paired with suppressors or other fancy muzzle devices, but those weren't around back when these were used (well, suppressors were, but they were rarer and more expensive).

These ones probably wouldn't be too bad - for the above one, I'm just guessing from an image, but I think it's barrel length might actually be similar to a regular AK, maybe a bit shorter (but the gun itself is also heavier, which would help with recoil), so it's probably comparable to an AK. The original RPD has a 20" barrel, which for a cartridge like 7.62x39mm is actually probably unnecessarily long, so you can lose some length safely.

I assume it's probably an American custom job, I'm not aware of Soviet/Chinese/Vietnamese attempts to do this. I think this was mostly a special forces specific thing, and part of the reason for doing it was Western militaries lacking anything nice and compact in an intermediate caliber for a long time (there's the CAR-15 in the 60s and 70s, but short-barreled ARs suffered from reliability issues for a long time). Vietnamese or other communist-aligned troops would just use their AKs (which yeah, aren't proper machine guns, but the thing about the RPD is it doesn't necessarily have the sustained fire capability that we might expect from a modern LMG like the M249, since there's no quick-change barrel)

the cool thing about this one is it was apparently recorded live - not for any particularly good reason, but just because the sole programmer (and later co-founder of Interplay, Rebecca Heineman) had to make the entire port in 10 weeks and didn't have the time to write the appropriate music driver for the 3DO, but luckily the 3DO happens to have a CD drive

https://xcancel.com/pawelwargan/status/1813851497781764474

a twitter thread about the Polish political concept of "Intermarium"

At the start of the 20th century, future Polish dictator Józef Piłsudski declared that Poland would set itself “the political goal of destroying the Russian state into its component parts”. Writing to Japan’s Foreign Ministry in the hope of winning support for Polish independence during the Russo-Japanese war, he insisted that Russia’s destruction would secure "not only the fulfilment of our Fatherland’s cultural aspirations for an independent existence, but also a guarantee of this existence”. Years later, reeling from world war and bracing against the stirrings of revolution unleashed in October 1917, Piłsudski’s anti-Tsarism turned into a sweeping anti-communism. In his vision, a weakened Germany and fragmented Soviet Union could make way for a new bloc connecting the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic seas — the Intermarium.

The new Soviet republics teemed with frustrated elites. Thwarted in their aspirations for bourgeois state-building by the emergence of an internationalist worker state, many went into exile. Through Piłsudski’s efforts, they converged in a movement that became known as the Promethean League. The League, as US anti-communist ideologue Timothy Snyder described it, was an “anti-communist international, designed to destroy the Soviet Union and to create independent states from its republics”. In 1926, Piłsudski seized power in a coup d’etat. Now, with the backing of the Polish state, the Prometheans would build institutions to bring their vision to life — from the Institute of the East in Warsaw and journals in Helsinki and Paris to university scholarships from Harbin to Cairo. Piłsudski believed that “[w]ithout an independent Ukraine, there cannot be an independent Poland.” And the exploitation of nationalism in Soviet Ukraine became a key pivot in the Promethean grand strategy.

::: spoiler more

The Prometheans were not alone in eyeing Ukraine. Adolf Hitler saw the region as a key to the eastward expansion of German lebensraum — or “living space”. During the war, parts of the Promethean League became willing collaborators of the Nazi war machine, feeding it intelligence from what Germany deemed its “Wild East”. The project continued after the war, with the US Central Intelligence Agency taking the place of the German Abwehr. The CIA actively recruited fascist collaborators from Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, and beyond — absorbing them into security agencies and establishing intellectual centers in exile that aimed at powering reaction back home. Declassified CIA documents reveal the intention to “exploit nationalist cultural and other dissident tendencies in Ukraine” and “exploit the minority nationality question in the Soviet Union” in the service of the global anti-communist project. With the defeat of socialism in Eastern Europe, these tendencies re-emerged in a vicious tide of reaction, and the long-suppressed echoes of Prometheanism began to sound throughout the region.

The collapse of the socialist counterweight to US power also unleashed a series of wars that dismantled any illusions that the “post-historic” era would bring peace. The assault on Yugoslavia, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, reminded an occasionally-intractable Europe of US suzerainty. But if the governments of Western Europe sometimes greeted US wars with determined, if feeble, protest, their Eastern neighbors were unburdened by such qualms. In 2003, the US war against the Iraqi people found vigorous cheerleaders in all the new Eastern European entrants to NATO.

...

The Atlanticist project arrived not only with guns. It arrived with bureaucrats and neoliberal dogmas — accelerating processes of “shock therapy” already underway. Across Eastern Europe, industrial production had already collapsed in the post-socialist period. Our cultural institutions were defunded. Education was “depoliticized”, substituting a left curriculum critical of capitalism and imperialism with one seeped in bourgeois ideology. By the time Joe Biden outlined the conditions for Poland’s accession to NATO in 1997, his prescriptions fell on trained ears. “Businesses like banks, the energy sector, the state airline, the state copper producer, and the telecommunications monopoly will have to be privatized,” he said. For fulfilling what many Eastern European reactionaries saw as their destiny — membership in “civilized”, Christian Europe — the hegemon would extract a bounty.

For the US, this partnership would prove fruitful. For decades, the US had been eyeing control over Eurasia — the “chief geopolitical prize”, as Polish-US strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1997. Ukraine, he said, was an “important space on the Eurasian chessboard” and “a geopolitical pivot” that would contain Russia and secure “unlimited” US control over the sprawling landmass and its resources. But the flimsy Franco-German attempts at securing what is sometimes termed Europe’s “strategic autonomy” undermined the US’s eastward advance. From the Druzhba to the Nordstream pipelines, projects of Eurasian integration threatened to undermine the US hegemonic project. “New Europe” became an important vehicle for containing these impulses. And their strategies — and the myriad institutions created to advance them — increasingly echoed those of the Prometheans from a century ago. In 2015, Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović and Polish President Andrzej Duda launched the Three Seas Initiative — the NATOfied brood of Piłsudski’s Intermarium. The Initiative would seek to shift trade across the Eurasian landmass from an East-West to a North-South axis, advancing the US objective of decoupling Europe from Russia and China

...

As the war in Ukraine escalated in February 2022, that transformation gained new strength. Emboldened by the US nuclear umbrella, and elevated politically within a fragmenting order that continues to disadvantage its peripheries, the Prometheans emerged as the lynchpins of a new, militarised, and subordinated Europe. In 2023, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki warned that Europe’s pursuit of strategic autonomy “means shooting into our own knee and making with China the same mistake as with Russia”. So here we begin to see why (certain) Eastern Europeans are so excited about a federated Europe that auspiciously excludes Russia — even while extending into Turkey and Azerbaijan. And we see why that story may be far from over. A Trump presidency will bring challenges to NATO that might see European strategic sovereignty reappear on the agenda. Will he turn to the New Prometheans to keep Europe in check once again?

:::

The club fight from Ong Bak is great, all the flying elbows and knees make muay thai/boran such an interesting martial art to watch, just look at this. Same movie has an amazing chase scene too.

Another Tony Jaa movie, The Protector, has one of the most impressive one-take scenes ever - a fighting climb up a tower through several floors of opponents. The choreography is a bit simpler and slower than some of Jaa's other stuff since obviously the physical strain of having to do this after climbing several flights of stairs impacts what you can do, but it's still amazing.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex has an instance of a kind of action scene I wish there was more of - where it's several minutes of planning and people maneuvering into place, only to explode into just a few seconds of actual violence. Another amazing scene is the helicopter sequence from the 2nd season, I love how maneuverable the tachikomas are shown to be, gotta be one of my favorite sci-fi vehicle/mech designs. The music and sound design's also great here.

Patlabor 2's jet interception scene isn't exactly an action scene per se, but it's genuinely one of the tensest things I've watched, just on the edge of my seat watching a fucking air traffic control screen (not sure what the proper term is for that) and listening to people talking about ETAs and coordinates

The Good, The Bad, The Weird is an amazing South Korean action movie, basically a cowboy movie but in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. One of the final action scenes is this big cavalry chase through the desert set to a remix of Santa Esmeralda's version of Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood, just an absolute banger . The guy riding against and right through a Japanese cavalry formation with his lever-action is just

Waterloo and War and Peace, just for the sheer spectacle of the Soviet government being like "sure, you can have an entire infantry division to basically reenact an actual battle of the era, we'll even train them in Napoleonic-era drill!"

I'm not sure about the etymology. Could simply mean "thing that hangs at your side", but that would apply to most swords.

I'm not sure if I can tell receiver details at that resolution, but a better giveaway is the stock - the 47 has its stock attached at an angle to the receiver (and the receiver itself has an angled rear end), with a metal bit inbetween, while the AKM has a nice right angle

(this might also be the exact image used for the emoji)

there's also a difference in the pistol grips (a similar situation with being attached at an angle and there being an extra connecting metal bit), but that's more difficult to see in a small image

more of an AK-SKS hybrid - the gas system is a short-stroke piston like the SKS, but the bolt and receiver are more like an AK

Probably a parade or something, yeah. This is presumably cropped from a larger photo which might clear things up, but a quick reverse image search didn't turn up anything beyond other copies of the same picture

It's similar, but not quite - the DOE one was an official Colt product, the Model 633, and it was in 9mm, while this was made by a small gunsmithing company (or maybe even just the one guy, Timothy F. La France, I can't find much information on how big the actual company was). I assume it was probably inspired by the Colt one, but I'm not sure if the dates line up.

I think it's 75 rounds for the 7.62x39mm ones, but that's for the RPK, not sure if the Type 81 has a different design.

100-rounders seem to usually be of the Beta C-Mag type:

and conventional 100-rounders are a lot bigger than the one on this Type 81 (although it's kind of hard to see on this tiny pic, I can't access the website it's from for I assume "American website owners don't want to bother with GDPR so they just IP-blocked Europe" reasons, so all I have is a thumbnail that Google's cached, but you might be able to open it up properly):

You think you just fell out of a coconut tree, Snake?

Coconut tree, huh?

No, you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you!

Context?

we can go even straighter