• YerbaYerba@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        My guess is that they can kind of steer it by driving only the right or left side wheels. It’s diesel electric so they could individually control each wheel motor.

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Oh no they tried to put a 12 axle all wheel drive on it. It failed spectacularly.

  • someguy3@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    I had no idea the Shinzo Abe thing was a doohickey. I take it that’s not a regular bullet? How did it work?

      • someguy3@lemmy.ca
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        3 months ago

        Looks like a lego guy at first.

        The significant plumes of smoke generated when the weapon was fired indicate that it does not make use of commercial small arms ammunition propellant (‘smokeless powder’), and may instead use blackpowder or an alternative propellant. This makes the use of ‘separate-loading’ ammunition (i.e., propellant and projectile loaded separately into the weapon) more likely, as well as increasing the likelihood that the weapon was a muzzle-loading design—that is, loaded from the bore (‘front’ of the barrel), rather than the breech (‘rear’ of the barrel) of the firearm.

        the weapon appears to use an electric firing mechanism. Images of the firearm show that an electrical wire passes through each endcap. …This high voltage creates a hot plasma arc between two conductive contacts that can be used to ignite flammable materials

        • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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          3 months ago

          Black powder, model rocket igniters, and ball bearings shoved into a piece of threaded pipe that’s capped on one end. You can build one of these in less than 30 minutes.

          Hardest thing to get in Japan would probably be the black powder and it’s completely possible to manufacture that yourself. Everything else comes from the plumbing aisle of a DIY store and a model rocket shop.

      • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
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        3 months ago

        Probably the most prominent electric firing mechanism for 3D-printed firearms has been developed by the user ‘@SuckBoyTony1’. This mechanism uses an 80 kV High Voltage Pulse Generator that converts 6–12 V (the electric potential typically provided by battery packs such as that seen with the assailant’s weapon) into 80 kV. This high voltage creates a hot plasma arc between two conductive contacts that can be used to ignite flammable materials

        What’s with this level of overengineering? Just get the Piezo from a lighter and maybe that igniter powder from fireworks and good.

        • dactylotheca@suppo.fiOP
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          3 months ago

          I’d guess people have tried those small piezos and they haven’t worked too well (not a big enough spark?), or at least it seems likely most would start from the simplest possible solution. I’d definitely have started with a piezo too if I was screwing around building a zip gun (which I’m definitely not doing)

    • CoffeeJunkie@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Firearms don’t have to be needlessly complicated, zeroed in. Ammo, propellant, firing cap/something to ignite propellant, metal tubes to direct the subsequent blast & ammo.

      The guy basically rigged up a rudimentary cyberpunk blunderbuss.

      • SSTF@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        M113 (Gavin) fitted with M5 Modular Crowd Control Munitions (MCCM). The MCCMs intentionally use the same bodies as Claymore mines for an intimidation factor. The MCCM works similarly to a Claymore, except with a much lower powered charge and rubber balls instead of metal.

        The vehicle was meant for military prison control. If a prison riot was getting out of hand, the vehicle could roll up and let off a broadside.

        • dactylotheca@suppo.fiOP
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          3 months ago

          Sometimes they (and/or the ground crew) burned or blew up too! Gotta love Nazi engineering that kills a lot of Nazis

            • dactylotheca@suppo.fiOP
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              3 months ago

              In John Clark’s book Ignition (highly recommended for rocketry nerds if you can get your hands on it. I had a copy but somehow managed to lose it…), he described chlorine trifluoride like this:

              It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.

  • SSTF@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Scorpion rocket launcher. (This one is legitimately neat. YES, the designers know what backblast is, and the design redirects it to the side and away from the shooter. NO, the launcher is not permanently attached to the M16, it fixes using the bayonet lug and goes on and off just as quickly.)

    • dactylotheca@suppo.fiOP
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      3 months ago

      Huh, yeah that’s actually a neat design. The fact that the back blast now goes in two directions must make that fun (“fun”) to use; at least with a regular shoulder-launched recoilless anything, you only need to make sure there’s nothing or nobody behind you that you don’t mind turning into dogfood and regrets

      • SSTF@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        It was developed as one of many proposed weapons to fill the U.S. Army’s desire for a squad level weapon that could be fired from inside a building, and packed more anti-armor punch than a 40mm.

        Think about the time period and planners thinking about how to stop hypothetical hoards of BMPs rolling through West Germany.

        This, along with other weapons, weren’t adopted because the Army pivoted doctrine away from focusing on new squad level weapons that could damage IFVs, to larger weapons like the TOW that could take out MBTs. The change in thinking traded lightweight and abundance organically to infantry on the move for better performance.

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          I appreciate when a military’s response to ‘how do we solve this problem?’ becomes ‘that is not your problem.’ Ze Germans have a term for overloading functionality: eierlegende Wollmilchsau. Literally an egg-laying wool-milk-pig. Get your whole breakfast and a cozy blanket from one made-up animal. It is important to divide responsibility and avoid conflicting design goals.

          Dudes fighting tanks is not a fair fight. You know what’s even less of a fair fight? Tanks fighting guided artillery.

  • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
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    3 months ago

    I made in my teens a gun from Lego Technic that shot a lady cracker with another lady cracker. It got about 20 m before the cracker exploded after 0.5 seconds.

    Sadly no foto, and it got unusable after about 20 shots.