Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Common sense (Score 2) 1591

You have to understand terminal ballistics to understand why they changed from MP5s to rifles(M16/M4/whatever). The 9mm round actually has a higher chance of over-penetrating a target than a .223 even though it has far less power. The .223 tends to fragment and tumble while the 9mm stays solid and passes through in roughly a straight line; possibly hitting someone behind them. This is research which has been done on statistics over the last 20 years from dozens of countries' police forces which is why you see the change moving away from sub-machineguns all over and not just in a single country.

Comment Re:KSP FTW (Score 1) 64

I've been playing KSP for a while too and it's a fantastic game. The reason you can't do Lagrange points is that it uses patched conics which does "spheres of influence" around planetary bodies and doesn't do gravity interpolation. That being said, the math was good enough to get us to the moon, so for a game as fun as KSP I'm not too upset.

Comment Re:All covered at that site. (Score 2) 409

In the book series The Night's Dawn Trilogy space combat was between manned ships which launched weapons drones. They were nothing more than a navigational computer strapped to an engine with lots of sub-munitions(nukes, kinetic projectiles, bomb pumped lasers, and ECM pods). They'd fly around with pretty realistic physics and launch swarms of the drones at each other, along the most probable paths the other ship would take, and then the drones would just fly in and shotgun all their munitions in the hopes of saturating the area enough so that one or two would hit even with the other ship firing countermeasures and maneuvering. It was pretty much all a game of probabilities.

Comment Re:Bla Bla Bla (Score 1) 420

I had a nuclear engineer describe it to me this way. Nuclear power stations for the grid's base load, step it up a few extra levels and use the extra power to crack hydrogen. Use that hydrogen to run turbines for the grid's variable load and produce enough of an excess to be able to sell it to fuel cars. It will require a lot of nuclear reactors, but completely replaces our dependence on fuels which may run out at some point and if the ecomentalists ever get over their fear of nuclear power, will solve what they see as the poisoning of the atmosphere. Except for the fissionable materials, the entire process is renewable and leaves no pollution, and if those fastbreed(I think) reactors which can run on spent fuel rods work as designed, we wouldn't have much of a containment issue either.

Comment Re:True. True. (Score 1) 688

If not for American Christianity, the War on Pot would be nothing more than some anti-Mexican racist rhetoric decades ago.

Umm... What?

I can't remember his name, but the guy who owned most of the paper production in the US would have lost everything when people began cultivating hemp for paper, because it was cheaper and produced higher quality paper. So hemp was dragged through the mud in a disinformation campaign to make it illegal so he could hold his monopoly on paper production. It has absolutely nothing to do with Mexicans or Christians at all, it was entirely an economic move which relied on people's prejudices to convince them it needed to be banned.

Slashdot Top Deals

Why did the Roman Empire collapse? What is the Latin for office automation?

Working...