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

  1. I agree about the handling; I had been reading horror stories for years about how poor the Tokarev's ergonomics are (one memorable review described it as having been designed for "robot claw hands"), but when I finally got one I was surprised by how comfortable it is. I guess I must have robot claw hands. :)
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  2. According to family legend, sometime around 1958 my grandfather (who was a member of one of the U.S. Army Reserve's competitive shooting teams at the time) needed to run a water line from a newly drilled well to his house. To do this, so the story goes, he dug a trench between the well and one of the house's concrete foundation walls, then used a sandbagged M1903 Springfield and a handful of Cartridges, Armor Piercing, Caliber .30, M2 to drill a hole in the wall. He may have inadvertently assassinated the furnace with the shot that finally penetrated the wall. As with all legends, I can offer no hard evidence that this one is true, although we did find a partly used box of 1950s-vintage M2 ammunition in his sock drawer when he moved to assisted living a few years ago... ;)
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  3.  @rohesilmnelohe  I may be wrong, but I don't think @wurfyy's complaint is necessarily based on a need for full auto, as such. :)
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  4.  @simoncleret  On the plus side, you don't have to wait for Windows to update if it happens to be Tuesday.
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  5. I remember the instructor making a particular point of the "HK slap" when I did the "rent a machine gun" thing with an MP5 at an indoor range once. The range employee who showed me how to work it was a laconic character--his actual words, as close as I can remember them a few years later, were "... an' then give 'er a smack. You can't [redacted] around with it, just whack it in good shape. It's German, you ain't gonna hurt it." Which rather set the tone for the whole experience. :) (The "safety briefing" portion of this same instructional session included the sentence, "Let's try an' keep it outta the ceiling," which turned out to be pretty easy with the ol' MP5. The old Mk I IBM Selectric is harder to control, although the consquences of losing control of a Selectric are less dramatic.)
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  6. It perished with honor.
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  7. Kiraly's "keep selling the same gun" approach reminds me a little of Wilhelm Bubits, who worked at Glock in the '90s and has since made something of a career of traveling around the industry developing pistols that are very like Glocks for companies that want to compete with Glock. :)
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  8. "Shooter ready?" "Non!" "Stand by..." "Merde."
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  9. It probably wouldn't happen nowadays, since the current patent code requires that an innovation be non-obvious to be patentable, but those were different times. (You could patent a new non-obvious process for making the holes, but the holes themselves would probably not pass muster with a modern patent judge.)
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  10. Also needs an underscore between the words.
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  11.  @x808drifter  My personal favorite bit was "You get more for your bang--literally," which seems to be an attempt at a stock marketroid hype phrase that didn't even land properly.
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  12. In college in the early 1990s, I once witnessed a weeks-long flamewar on one of the school's internal Usenet groups in which one student vehemently insisted against all comers and in spite of all evidence presented that the proper nomenclature for shotguns was ".12 gauge," and if you didn't accept his word on that, you were the worst kind of moron. At an engineering school! I think he knew he was wrong a fairly short way into the adventure, he'd just backed himself so far up the tree by that point that he felt he had no choice but to double down and keep yelling. :)
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  13. Radium-dial wristwatches weren't radioactive enough to be dangerous to their owners. The people who painted the dials, on the other hand...
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  14. 8:52 "Development would likely have lasted for many years were it not for--" (my brain, at deafening volume: "THE FACT THAT WAR WERE DECLARED") "--a declaration of war between the Austrian-aligned and Prussian-aligned German states in early 1866." Good job, Ian. In your place, I'm not sure I would have been able to resist the temptation. (Also, argh, you tease. My copy hasn't shipped yet. :)
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  15. Reminds me of the gun Mark Twain describes himself carrying in Roughing It: "I was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little Smith & Wesson's seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homeopathic pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult."
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  16. Good grief. It's like you folks have never heard heard of comic exaggeration.
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  17. "Well, you know, we had a few beers, next thing you know, there we are in Czechoslovakia..."
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  18. I had a Swedish friend in college whose cat was named Snabblagad (which I'm probably spelling wrong, as I never saw it written out). She claimed it was Swedish for "easy to cook". :)
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  19. It's funny how these lessons have to be learned over and over again. Remember the VW Phaeton? Big-ticket luxury car, meant to compete with the Mercedes-Benz S-class et al. Completely flopped because who's going to pay S-class money for a Volkswagen? Never mind that it arguably was that much money's worth of car, the badge created the automatic expectation that there was no way it could be worth the asking price. Also, they obviously should have called it the XL R 8.
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  20. I'm sure the one wearing a hat had a pipe in his coat pocket, just waiting to light up once he was done testing grenades. :)
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  21. My favorite detail is that it was particularly troublesome in dusty conditions, and virtually all of 1930s Italy's imperial ambitions centered around North Africa. It wasn't just that they were also operating there, they were pretty much only operating there. Classic. (failure tune from The Price Is Right plays here)
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  22. For best results, particularly in teahouse shootouts, you need a couple of Chinese Tokarevs with the infinite ammo cheat enabled.
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  23. "Give the new boy the rundown on the rifle, will ya." "See this here? Push it down, now you're killin'. Pull it up, now you're killin' faster."
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  24. "A pom pom is an excellent weapon when you are using it but a horrid thing when the other chap has got it." - Sgt. P.C. Jonas, 43rd (Suffolk) Company Imperial Yeomanry, on his experience in the 1899-1902 South African (or Second Boer) War; quoted in Stephen M. Miller's Volunteers on the Veld. Jonas was talking about the Maxim-Nordenfeld QF 1-pounder autocannon, but the principle is similar; the Second Boer War was British forces' first taste of what a war against an enemy with even approximate technological parity would be like. Unfortunately, it seems Lord Kitchener et al. learned few lessons from the experience.
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  25. Weirdly, I knew that because of how sportscasters used to pronounce the name of Karch Kiraly, the volleyball player.
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  26. Now all I can think of is that bit from the old M*A*S*H episode: WOUNDED ETHIOPIAN SOLDIER: (speaking Amharic) KLINGER: I think he's thanking you. HAWKEYE: Well, that's Haile Selassie of you, sir.
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  27. "What Browning had come up with was a gas port in the barrel here, which blows gas downward, hits this cap, which throws this lever down in this circular arc, which hits the bowling ball and sends it rolling down the ramp, where it falls into the bucket, which pulls the rope down through the pulley, which lifts the cage with the chicken in it at the other end of the rope, the chicken pecks at this tray of seed, the flint attached to the chicken's beak hits this steel plate and makes sparks, that ignites the priming powder, which sets off the counter-charge that drives the bolt backward, and that cycles the gun. Hiram Maxim had a different take..."
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  28. The implication being that it's not the answer to the question the Swiss police were actually asking, either.
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  29. You just reminded me of the video with Bloke on the Range in the sauna wearing the complete wool Tommy kit.
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  30. The IJA made their own (cargo-carrying) submarines as well. Meanwhile, the IJN had its own explicitly-land-based aircraft, in parallel with its carrier-based aviation.
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  31. The dueling dis tracks of the late 19th century.
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  32. Well, I mean, they did go out of business twice in three years, so...
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  33. "Plagiarize! Let no one else's work evade your eyes! Remember why the good Lord made your eyes so don't shade your eyes but plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize! Only be sure always to call it please 'research'." - Tom Lehrer, "Lobachevsky" (1960)
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  34. ... the third one ducks. Thank you, we're here all week.
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  35. "Which is, by the way, a fantastically excellent name."
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  36. +Paul Fabrique One tends to doubt it can be a pleasant experience being shot, full stop.
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  37. +Paul Fabrique Anyone else remember the old Street Samurai Catalog for first-edition Shadowrun? "Wonderful. Now I can flatten light ammo against body armor faster than ever before." :)
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  38. They missed the barrel extension, but some maniac lopped off the hammer spur. You hate to see it...
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  39.  @Quert_Zuiopue  Realistically? It's probably not anywhere this year.
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  40. "Zat vill be adekvate. I vill zecure zis area."
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  41. I wondered about that. The undervoltage batteries probably don't help either.
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  42. Lovely! Now all we need is a .22 rimfire Gabbett-Fairfax Mars. Presumably it would have to be .22 Magnum. :)
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  43.  @PedroThePanda64  Ask your doctor if clipackizine is right for you.
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  44. What really struck me about the Stop once I got my own was how small it is. I mean, yeah, you can sort of see that here, but for some reason it didn't really register until I was holding one. Even for a .32 it's tiny wee.
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  45. Imagine the size of ballpoint pen Universal Disassembly Tool it would have taken to do that.
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  46. As a friend of mine once edited a magazine ad for a hygiene product: "It's new, it's neat, it's discreet, and it hardly ever blows up any more."
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  47. "I think it's worth pointing out that this is, in fact, objectively the INcorrect way to hold a pistol." Epic. As Ian describes him, Joe Hale reminds me a bit of Malcolm Bricklin, whose eponymous '70s car company was basically the prototype for DeLorean (gull wings doors, massive government grant scams in a place where no reasonable person would build a car factory, and all), and who then went on to found YugoCars, Inc., the company that imported the Zastava Koral to the US, badged as the notorious Yugo. Mind you, Bricklin also founded Subaru of America, so, y'know, stopped clock twice a day and all that. But the whole "super-confident serial entrepreneur who lurches bombastically from disaster to disaster" thing sounds very similar.
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  48.  @lairdcummings9092  The accounts of the Kent State incident I've read come across a lot like the Boston Massacre of 1770, just with more modern hardware--poorly trained troops way out of their depth in a chaotic situation for which they were not the right tool in the first place, with ineffective leadership, panicking.
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  49. See also: the Roman numerals on Italian guns made between 1922 and 1944.
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  50. Years ago, I took an introductory machine tool class as a mechanical engineering tech major at a flagship state university. We broke up into teams and built little single-cylinder pneumatic reciprocating engines from drawings provided as part of the course materials. We weren't in training to be machinists; the purpose of the course was to give us a practical understanding of what the machinists who would have to build the stuff we eventually engineered would be up against. Most of us had never seen a machine tool in person before the start of the course.  We did way better work than that.
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