Comments by "ZGryphon" (@ZGryphon) on "Forgotten Weapons" channel.

  1. It does, but that's not why it's effective, is what I believe he's getting at.
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  2. The Soviets seem to have been fond of that "let's just stuff more powder into an existing cartridge, so that people have the best odds of sticking it into old guns chambered for the original and blowing them up" thing. They did the same with 7.63 Mauser -> 7.62 Tokarev.
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  3.  Shade Crenshaw  Funnily enough, movies with sound were still a pretty new thing when that law was passed.
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  4. Best company name ever.
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  5. I love that the Swiss felt the need to include a warning label on the optic because of the tritium. "CAUTION: THIS PRODUCT WILL BE VERY SLIGHTLY RADIOACTIVE FOR A FEW YEARS. DO NOT EAT."
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  6. +IR4TE There are also those of us who instantly remember the gun shop scene from the original Terminator. "The 12-gauge auto-loader." "That's Italian. You can go pump or auto."
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  7. Finns always have the best nicknames for military hardware. I remember reading somewhere that the Finnish Air Force pilots who flew the Brewster Buffalo in WWII called it something that translates to "Butt Walter", which, well, to quote Pfc. Garlick in Good Morning, Vietnam, "I have no idea what that means, sir, but it sounds very negative to me." :)
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  8. This reminds me of the time I was at a commercial indoor range, and a guy came in with a .44 Magnum Colt Anaconda he'd just gotten back from being customized. It had something like a 1½-inch barrel. You could feel the blast through the divider walls between the lanes. When he was done, there was a visible fan pattern of unburned powder on the floor in front of his station. Everybody who worked there stopped what they were doing and gathered around to marvel at how much extra money this guy had paid someone to ruin a perfectly good, already quite expensive revolver for him. He was incredibly proud of it.
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  9. Ian's (immediately corrected) misspeak about SWAT team members practicing "ballistic entries" gave me the image of a SWAT officer serving a search warrant on a home by being flung bodily through the living-room window by one of those giant circus cannons, and for that, I will always be grateful.
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  10. "Well, we can't do a carbine version of the Lebel because that would reduce the tubular magazine capacity unacceptably." "No worries, I've come up with a new concept that uses a Mannlicher-style magazine." "Great, how many rounds does it hold?" "Four. Well... probably three." "... Ship it!" Ah, military procurement.
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  11. Mr. Knoble appears to have been one of the few known makers of American Chinese Mystery Pistols. Even the rounded magazine thing is reminiscent.
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  12. Fun fact: In Japan, the word for "stapler" is ホチキス, hochikisu - literally "Hotchkiss" rendered in the Japanese syllabary. Prominently marked Hotchkiss-brand staplers were the most popular office tools in the country for much of the early twentieth century, and the name entered common use as a generic word for the tool (similar to the way English-speakers tend to call any adjustable wrench a Crescent wrench). Point being, you guys might have been better off with one of those. :)
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  13. "Not sufficiently obvious that it was out of ammo." I know what they meant-- that it was hard to distinguish being empty from a malfunction--but still, on the face of it, that's a funny thing to say about a gun. Generally speaking, the fact that it won't shoot any more is the place to start your investigation. :)
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  14.  @Metallica4Life92  "An undertaking usually involving danger; an exciting or remarkable experience." I'd say that qualifies, for some values of "exciting". :)
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  15. True story: In the 1970s, there was a joint Navy-CIA operation to place a wiretap on a Soviet military telephone cable that ran under the Sea of Okhotsk. Eventually the Soviets found it, and when they did, they had no trouble determining who put it there, because a number of internal components were marked PROPERTY OF UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.
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  16.  @confuseatronica  I'm guessing "gloves" was the answer more often than not.
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  17. "That's one of the configurations of Stoner that you just don't see very often." Yes, as opposed to the belt-fed LMG version, which I have to push out of my way to get to more interesting things in every gun shop I visit. I mean I know what he meant, but it's just funny how he said it. Right? Just me? Maybe my dad? OK.
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  18. I "remilitarized" my grandfather's M1903A3 Springfield (well, technically Remington) deer rifle a couple years ago, but not to try and make the rifle worth more. I did it because when he gave me the rifle before going into assisted living (where he wouldn't have been allowed to keep it), he mentioned that he wished he hadn't sporterized it. So in my case it was more about doing the detective work, and then the work work, to undo one of an old man's regrets, if that makes any sense. In a case like that, or just as a project for fun, I think it's worth doing. (As a financial proposition, it feels more like fraud, but maybe don't go by me.)
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  19. It's not the kind of gun that's used to shoot people in the front of the head, I shouldn't imagine.
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  20. +Jason Clark More practically, the patent official who decided a bored hole somehow constituted a non-obvious invention, and therefore granted White a patent for it, demonstrated why patent laws need to be administered more sensibly than they sometimes are.
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  21. Except for the ones with the broken legs. They're not going much of anywhere.
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  22. And when drums stop, keyboard solo.
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  23. A lot of that stuff was probably still classified when the original MOH games were made.
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  24. +Andrew Suryali The near-total collapse of the German economy in 1921-24 wouldn't have helped Luger much either.
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  25. "Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another episode of Forgotten Hats." :)
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  26. Yeah, there's something really satisfying about the authority he handles that shotgun with.
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  27. With that crazy magazine system, they're basically tiny naval rifles.
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  28. Given that actual Thompsons operate on a mechanical principle (the Blish effect) that turns out to have been completely fictional, one hesitates to imagine what an experience a Chinese Mystery Thompson must have been.
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  29. Technically speaking, it has terrible accuracy but great precision, if I remember the distinction correctly from intro engineering physics. The rifle won't hit what you aim it at, but it will hit the same wrong place every time. :)
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  30. "Thank you for not smoking." - Robocop, Robocop 2
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  31.  @ForgottenWeapons  Maybe the warlord weaponsmiths involved were adherents to the 1891 U.S. Board on Geographical Names ruling that, as part of a huge and absurdly misguided attempt to impose standardization on American place names, towns with names ending in -burgh should be forced to drop the H. This controversy raged for decades in Pittsburg{h}, with some newspapers in town still calling the place Pittsburg as late as 1923! ... OK, probably not. :)
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  32.  @Gundam944  Don't forget the Kriss Vector. All the hype.
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  33. Herr Schulhof can hardly be held responsible for a) his name or b) cultural conditions in another country 130 years in the gun's future.
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  34. Is Havana syndrome like Stockholm syndrome, but with cigars?
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  35.  @delfinenteddyson9865  Except in bullpup rifles! That's one of the things I've never liked about bullpups. The chamber is where all the bad things happen, I don't want it that close to my eyes.
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  36. Ah, Smill & Welson's principal foreign competition. We hate K&H in Sprangfeld.
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  37. "Czechoslovakia never used drums." It's true, all of the percussion in their national music was provided by a Roland TR808. (Just one. It was kept in a vault in Prague when not in use.) Edited to wonder: I vaguely recall a video, either here or on InRange, in which some Eastern Bloc rifle or another failed you so spectacularly at a match that it ended up getting pitched into a dumpster on camera. Was that a Vz 52? I feel like it might have been, but I haven't found the video to check.
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  38. It never registered with me before now that Krieghoff was actually the name of a person. Talk about nominative determinism. "Well, my name is Warhope, I guess I might as well start a military armaments company."
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  39. In fairness, I've never seen a tangent sight on anything that wasn't hilariously optimistic at the top end.
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  40. It's probably just a coincidence, but the fact that it looks exactly like it was made from actual bicycle frame tubing really drives home that "made in a bicycle factory" thing. :)
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  41. More so when you consider that most of what makes a Glock work was developed 60-70 years before, well, the Glock.
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  42.  @gormros  Oh man, that gives my headache a headache.
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  43.  @highmolecularweightRDX  Ah, the Internet, where people Have Feelings™ about things that happened 218 years ago. (Also, Theodore Roosevelt routinely carried a handgun while he was president--probably a prudent idea, since he became president because his predecessor was assassinated. Mind you, it didn't do him a ton of good in 1912, when he was running for re-election and got shot on his way to deliver a campaign speech. Which he delivered anyway, because he was Theodore goddam Roosevelt. But I digress.)
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  44. After which, presumably, he moves to New York, assumes the identity of socialite Lamont Cranston, and becomes a scourge of crime.
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  45. Or two of three, depending on how you look at it.
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  46.  @beargillium2369  I was going to make a joke about the ZiP™ SBR™, but upon reflection, that wouldn't be fair to this gun. The Volcanics were really beautifully made, it's just the weedy ammunition that lets them down.
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  47. Jim Kirk did it in a cave with a box of scraps!
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  48. I love how the proportions of the 115mm shell case (I'm guessing coincidentally, but still) make it look very much like a giant 7.62×54R round. Even the taper looks similar. (Also, the cloud of dust that erupts from every surface on the outside of the tank when the 115 goes off.)
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  49. "It looks like someone described the real thing to the designer over the phone," as one of the guys on the old Top Gear once said about a Chinese knockoff of the Rolls-Royce Phantom.
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  50. I've also seen it described as a "crackle finish".
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