Quotulatiousness

July 4, 2019

Gyrojet Carbine, Mark 1 Model B

Filed under: History, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 27 Aug 2015

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

Hammer price: $3,000

The Gyrojet was one of the more creative and one of the most futuristic firearms innovations of the last few decades – unfortunately it wasn’t able to prove sustainable on the market.

The idea was to use burning rocket fuel to launch projectiles, instead of pressurized gas. The advantage was that without the huge pressure of standard cartridges, a rocket-firing gun could be made far lighter and cheaper, as it had no need to contain pressure. The rockets would accelerate down the barrel as their fuel burned (and the 4 rocket jets would be angled to put a spin on the projectile for accuracy), and the weapon would actually have the most kinetic energy at something like 20 yards downrange, when the fuel was expended.

A decent number of Gyrojet handguns were made and sold (mostly as curiosities), but intrinsic accuracy problems prevented them from ever being taken seriously as weapons. The company behind the guns (MB Associates) went out of business shortly, unable to fully exploit their full range of ideas. One of those ideas was a carbine variant of the gun. A few hundred were made in two different models, and we have the chance today to take a look at one of the Mark 1 Model B sporter-style carbines.

July 3, 2019

Tank Chats #51 TANKFEST 2017 | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, Technology, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published on 25 May 2018

At TANKFEST 2017, the Musée des Blindés brought their unique Saint Chamond tank, which sat alongside the Museum’s replica Mark IV and A7V. David Fletcher took the opportunity to talk about the three First World War vehicles as they stood side-by-side.

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July 1, 2019

Very Early Mars Pistol #4

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 17 Apr 2015

Sold for $46,000.

Until the midle of the 20th century, the most powerful automatic pistol made was Sir Hugh Gabbett-Fairfax’s Mars pistol. With the .45 caliber version approaching the energy of a .45 Winchester Magnum, it was quite the accomplishment for a gun designed initially in 1898! Well, RIA has a very early example of the Mars – serial number 4 – coming up for sale. This gun (chambered for the .360 Mars cartridge) has a number of features that differ from the more “typical” Mars pistols (all 80 or so that were ultimately made). These include a very long barrel, a tangent-style rear sight, and a 3-lug bolt instead of the standard 4-lug type. A very cool pistol to have a look at!

June 25, 2019

Mars Automatic Pistols

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 1 Mar 2015

Sold for:
$74,750 (.45 cal example)
$40,250 (8.5mm example)

The Mars pistol was designed by Sir Hugh Gabbett-Fairfax in England in 1898, and only 81 were produced by the time manufacturing ended in 1907. These pistols were chambered for several different cartridges, all of them tremendously powerful for the day (and really not equaled by another self-loading pistol until the Automag).

Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

Theme music by Dylan Benson – http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

I first heard of these pistols in one of L. Neil Smith’s first SF novels, and they sounded so over-the-top that I assumed he’d made them up for the story. This is a fascinating piece of hand artillery that I’d be terrified to have pointed at me (but I’d probably be nearly as terrified to shoot).

June 22, 2019

Gyrojet Rocket Pistol

Filed under: History, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 8 Sep 2014

http://www.forgottenweapons.com

The Gyrojet was the closest thing to a commercially successful rocket pistol, although not many were sold before the company went out of business. This is the 13mm pistol version (the most common type of Gyrojet), and fires a 180 grain rocket projectile. It was for sale – with 15 rounds of live ammunition – at the Rock Island Premier Auction in September. Hammer price on it was $5500.

Theme music by Dylan Benson – http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

June 18, 2019

What Happened to the Giant Hovercraft SR-N4? – The Concorde of the Seas

Filed under: Britain, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Curious Droid
Published on 8 Sep 2017

They were once known as the “Concorde of the Seas”: mighty flying boats that ferried their passengers with speed and style. Hovercraft was a symbol of national innovation and represented the future of transport in the 20th Century.

And yet, like the Concorde, the huge iconic “Mountbatten-class” hovercraft that once traversed the 22-mile English Channel from England to France carrying hundreds or passengers and cars are no longer with us.

So what happened to the giant hovercraft SN-R4?

Patreon : https://www.patreon.com/curiousdroid
Paypal.me : https://www.paypal.me/curiousdroid

Sponsors: Symon Hamer, Florian Hesse, Georgi Dobrev, Douglas Gustafson, Marcus Chiado, Mitchell Payce, Skalgrin, Jorn Karlsen, John Roscoe.

This episode’s shirt was the Trip Paisley Surf Retro by Madcap England and is available from http://www.atomretro.com/madcap_england
Get 10% discount with the code DROID10

Presented By Paul Shillito
Written & Researched by Andy Munzer
Additional Material by Paul Shillito
Images and Footage : retepbleck, MAD Hovercraft, http://www.hovercraft-museum.org, Griffon Hoverwork, kentishmanvideo
Music by Mike Mullen, http://www.positrosmic.com

May 20, 2019

The Evolution Of Knightly Armour – 1066 – 1485

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Metatron
Published on 16 May 2017

A video full of details which took over 30 hours in the making. I hope you like it and you find the info in it useful 😀

Armour (spelled armor in the US) is a protective covering that is used to prevent damage from being inflicted to an object, individual, or vehicle by weapons or projectiles, usually during combat, or from damage caused by a potentially dangerous environment or action. The word “armour” began to appear in the Middle Ages as a derivative of Old French. It is dated from 1297 as a “mail, defensive covering worn in combat”. The word originates from the Old French armure, itself derived from the Latin armatura meaning “arms and/or equipment”, with the root armare meaning “arms or gear”.

Armour has been used throughout recorded history. It has been made from a variety of materials, beginning with rudimentary leather protection and evolving through mail and metal plate into today’s modern composites.
Significant factors in the development of armour include the economic and technological necessities of its production. For instance, plate armour first appeared in Medieval Europe when water-powered trip hammers made the formation of plates faster and cheaper.

Well-known armour types in European history include the lorica hamata, lorica squamata, and lorica segmentata of the Roman legions, the mail hauberk of the early medieval age, and the full steel plate harness worn by later medieval and renaissance knights, and breast and back plates worn by heavy cavalry in several European countries until the first year of World War I (1914–15). The samurai warriors of feudal Japan utilised many types of armour for hundreds of years up to the 19th century.

Plate armour became cheaper than mail by the 15th century as it required less labour, labour that had become more expensive after the Black Death, though it did require larger furnaces to produce larger blooms. Mail continued to be used to protect those joints which could not be adequately protected by plate.
The small skull cap evolved into a bigger helmet, the bascinet. Several new forms of fully enclosed helmets were introduced in the late 14th century.

By about 1400 the full plate armour had been developed in armouries of Lombardy. Heavy cavalry dominated the battlefield for centuries in part because of their armour.

Probably the most recognised style of armour in the World became the plate armour associated with the knights of the European Late Middle Ages.

May 19, 2019

Malcom McLean’s container shipping revolution

Filed under: Business, Economics, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Alexander Hammond recounts the tale of a former truck driver who was instrumental in revolutionizing the way we ship products around the world:

Deep-sea containers from China at Ely, Cambridgeshire
Via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1937, McLean made a routine delivery of cotton bales to a port in North Carolina for shipment to New Jersey. As McLean couldn’t leave until his cargo had been loaded onto the ship, he sat for hours watching dozens of dockhands load thousands of small packages onto the ship. McLean realized that the current loading process wasted enormous amounts of time and money, and he began to wonder if there could be a more productive alternative.

In 1952, McLean thought of loading entire trucks onboard a ship to be transported along the American Atlantic coast (i.e., from North Carolina to New York). Although this idea would dramatically reduce loading times, he soon realized that these “trailer ships” would not be very efficient due to the large amount of wasted cargo space.

Mclean modified his original design so that just the containers—and not the trucks’ chassis—were loaded onto the ship. He also developed a way for the containers to be stacked on top of one another. That was the origin of the modern-day shipping container.

In 1956, McLean secured a bank loan for $22 million. He used the money to buy two World War II tanker ships and convert them to carry his containers. Later that year, one of his two ships, the SS Ideal-X, was loaded with 58 containers and sailed from New Jersey to Houston, Texas. At the time, McLean’s shipping company offered transport prices that were 25 percent lower than those of his competitor as well as the ability to lock the containers in order to prevent cargo theft, which also appealed to many new customers.

By 1966, McLean launched his first transatlantic service and three years later, McLean had started a transpacific shipping line. As the advantages of McLean’s container system became clear, bigger ships, more sophisticated containers, and larger cranes to load cargo were developed.

Update 21 May: Here’s a breathtaking example of just how much McLean’s containers changed the world:

Samuel Pauly Invents the Cartridge in 1812

Filed under: Europe, History, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 4 May 2019

(Video reuploaded to removed an allegedly copyrighted still image)

This Pauly shotgun (lot #1346) sold at Morphy’s April 2019 auction for $5,535.

Samuel Johannes Pauli was born outside Bern, Switzerland in 1766, and became an engineer of wide interests. Among them were bridge design, passenger-carrying balloons (he would work seriously on a 15-20 passenger balloon service between London and Paris later in life), and firearms. Only a few years after Forsyth’s invention of fulminate priming, Pauly would become the first to use it in a fully self-contained cartridge. He patented this invention in Paris in 1812, having moved there in 1802 in pursuit of financing for his many grand projects (going then by the name Jean Samuel Pauly).

Pauly’s cartridge was a multi-part affair with a rimmed brass base containing a fulminate powder, connected to a paper or cardboard cartridge body which held a charge of regular gunpowder and the shot or ball to be fired. It was an expensive system, but contained all the necessary elements of a modern cartridge.

Pauly would move to England in 1814 (then taking the name Samuel John Pauly) in pursuit of aviation inventions, although he continued to tinker on his firearms design and filed two additional patent improvements. He died in London in 1821, and his name and work became rather obscure. His former apprentices would carry on his legacy in their own work – Nicolaus Dreyse would produce the needle fire system of Dreyse rifles used by the Prussian military, and Casimir Lefaucheux would create the pinfire system based on Pauly’s designs. Lefaucheux in fact became owner of the company in 1827, and with his son would provide the most direct link between Pauly’s design and the modern metallic cartridge.

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April 17, 2019

Tank Chats #46 Ram Kangaroo | The Funnies | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, Technology, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published on 16 Feb 2018

As part of the Funnies mini-series, David Fletcher takes a look at the troop-carrying Ram Kangaroo.

Towards the end of World War Two, Canadian Ram tanks were converted into Armoured Personnel Carriers called Kangaroos.

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April 16, 2019

An Orgy of Innovation

Filed under: Economics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Marginal Revolution University
Published on 20 Apr 2015

The list of famous inventions from the last few centuries is long, and you may even be making use of one right now — laptops, smartphones, tablets, and televisions, for instance. There are countless unsung improvements, too, that make our daily lives much easier. We’ve all benefited from zip top sandwich bags, twist bottle caps, and long-lasting batteries, to name a few!

The economic historian Deirdre McCloskey coined the term “innovationism” to describe the phenomenal rise in innovation over the past couple hundred years. While there have always been inventors and innovators, that number exploded after the eighteenth century, contributing to what we’ve described in previous videos as the “Hockey Stick of Human Prosperity.”

Why has innovation grown so rapidly? Economist Douglass North argues it has to do with institutions such as property rights, non-corrupt courts, and rule of law, which lay the foundation for innovation to take place. Others attribute the rise to factors such as education or access to reliable energy. McCloskey argues that what really kicked innovation into high gear is a change in attitude — ordinary people who once celebrated conquerers and kings began to celebrate merchants and inventors.

In this video, we discuss these ideas further. After all, a better understanding of what drives innovation could help poor countries that still live on the handle of the “Hockey Stick” reach a much greater level of prosperity.

April 13, 2019

History Summarized: Steel (Feat. “That Works”)

Filed under: Europe, History, Humour, India, Japan, Middle East, Science, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 12 Apr 2019

More from Matt & Ilya on “That Works”: https://bit.ly/2D0A6qk

More about steel from Shadiversity:
— “When Was Steel Invented” https://bit.ly/2uSwcvh
— “The Riddle of Steel” https://bit.ly/2G6TB28
— “The Oldest Steel Sword” https://bit.ly/2VvWVZZ

CORRECTION from 12:10 — The back of a Katana after differential hardening process is a lower-carbon STEEL, but it is still Steel rather than Iron. My mistake. The higher-carbon content Martensite forms the cutting edge, and low-carbon steel forms the spine.

BLUE’S BOOK: Philosophicalphridays.com

PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP

April 3, 2019

Tank Chats #45 Major General Sir Percy Hobart | The Funnies | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published on 10 Feb 2018

Welcome to the first in the Tank Chat Funnies mini-series!

In Tank Chats #45 David begins a series on one of his personal interests, the Funnies of the 79th Armoured Division. However the 79th and its Funnies would have been nothing without its inspirational leader Major General Percy Hobart, so David starts with the man and we promise will follow very shortly with his machines.

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March 24, 2019

Major Fosbery’s Automatic Revolver: History and Mechanics

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 9 Aug 2017

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

George Fosbery, V.C., was a decorated British officer with substantial combat experience in India when he decided to design a better sidearm in 1895. True semiautomatic handguns were in their very early stages of development at that time, and Fosbery thought that one could have a more durable, more powerful, and simpler weapon by using a revolver as a foundation. He began experimenting with a Colt SAA, but soon moved to using Webley revolvers when he found the Colt internals insufficiently durable for his conversion.

What Fosbery did was to relocate the barrel and cylinder into an upper assembly which could move independently of the grip and trigger of the gun. Upon firing, the energy of recoil would push the upper assembly rearwards, re-cocking the hammer and indexing the cylinder to the next chamber. This gave the shooter the rapid fire of a double action revolver with the excellent trigger pull of a single action revolver.

The gun was introduced at the Bisley shooting matches, where it proved quite popular as a target gun. By the time production began in the early years of the 20th century, however, semi-auto handguns had improved significantly, and the opportunity for the Webley-Fosbery to be a big seller had already passed. Still, British officers were required to provide sidearms chambered for the .455 service cartridge, and more than a few opted to purchase Webley-Fosberys.

Thanks to Mike Carrick of Arms Heritage magazine for providing this Webley-Fosbery for this video! See his regular column here: https://armsheritagemagazine.com

If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow

March 3, 2019

QotD: Four ways to corporate monopoly

Filed under: Business, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

1. Proprietary technology. This one is straightforward. If you invent the best technology, and then you patent it, nobody else can compete with you. Thiel provocatively says that your technology must be 10x better than anyone else’s to have a chance of working. If you’re only twice as good, you’re still competing. You may have a slight competitive advantage, but you’re still competing and your life will be nasty and brutish and so on just like every other company’s. Nobody has any memory of whether Lycos’ search engine was a little better than AltaVista’s or vice versa; everybody remembers that Google’s search engine was orders of magnitude above either. Lycos and AltaVista competed; Google took over the space and became a monopoly.

2. Network effects. Immortalized by Facebook. It doesn’t matter if someone invents a social network with more features than Facebook. Facebook will be better than their just by having all your friends on it. Network effects are hard because no business will have them when it first starts. Thiel answers that businesses should aim to be monopolies from the very beginning – they should start by monopolizing a tiny market, then moving up. Facebook started by monopolizing the pool of Harvard students. Then it scaled up to the pool of all college students. Now it’s scaled up to the whole world, and everyone suspects Zuckerberg has somebody working on ansible technology so he can monopolize the Virgo Supercluster. Similarly, Amazon started out as a bookstore, gained a near-monopoly on books, and used all of the money and infrastructure and distribution it won from that effort to feed its effort to monopolize everything else. Thiel describes how his own company PayPal identified eBay power sellers as its first market, became indispensible in that tiny pool, and spread from there.

3. Economies of scale. Also pretty straightforward, and especially obvious for software companies. Since the marginal cost of a unit of software is near-zero, your cost per unit is the cost of building the software divided by the number of customers. If you have twice as many customers as your nearest competitor, you can charge half as much money (or make twice as much profit), and so keep gathering more customers in a virtuous cycle.

4. Branding. Apple is famous enough that it can charge more for its phones than Amalgamated Cell Phones Inc, even for comparable products. Partly this is because non-experts don’t know how to compare cell phones, and might not trust Consumer Reports style evaluations; Apple’s reputation is an unfakeable sign that their products are pretty good. And partly it’s just people paying extra for the right to say “I have an iPhone, so I’m cooler than you”. Another company that wants Apple’s reputation would need years of successful advertising and immense good luck, so Apple’s brand separates it from the competition and from the economic state of nature.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Zero to One”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-01-31.

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