Boomstick's and shooty shooty bang bang's - The GUN Thread!
- Thread starter Kobold
- Start date
It got my uncle. Dude was 40, his kids hadn't even left High School yet. Fuck pancreatic cancer (and cancer in general).Well, fuck.Pancreatic is pretty much a death sentence.
I think the survival rate is so low that once diagnosed Doctors basically consider you dead already, IIRC, albeit with at least a year. You may have a few years extra if treatment succeeds to some extent, but there's no real chance of survival.
At least with other cancers, even brain-related ones, there are chances (though none of those chances were granted to my poor mother) of long-term survival and remission.
Pancreatic, though?
You've got my empathy for your uncle and his family. Fuck cancer.
It depends. What makes pancreatic cancer very deadly is that it's typically asyptomatic in early stages, which means by the time anyone realizes you have cancer, it's late stage and there's no chance left. In roughly half of patients, pancreatic cancer isn't diagnosed until it's already at stage 4, with a five-year relative survival rate on the order of three percent.
Yeah, and that's why it's considered a death sentence; it's typically diagnosed at too late a stage to really do anything about it.
If a doctor diagnoses you and it wasn't caught, by some miracle, early, they're reading off a death sentence and already consider you a dead man/woman walking (though, of course they'd never say that openly).
Yes. The survival rate is as good as any other cancer if caught early, but. . . that's the rare, lucky case.
Carrot of Truth
War is Peace
There has been a lot of shady shit surrounding the XM7, So maybe it is a gimmick.
*shrugs*
It's quite likely that no cased ammunition repeating rifle will ever actually be "better enough" than the plain old AR platform to justify large scale procurement, but the Army will never give up on frittering away millions here, millions there, millions there on attempts at whiz-bang replacement rifles. They've always hated the AR for being too futuristic and at the same time not futuristic enough.
There are, in theory, ways around that. But yes -- my point is simply that the AR is already so good that it's going to take a very substantial change in the underlying technology to actually be "better enough".
TheRejectionist
TheRejectionist
My mum got it last year. Breast not pancreas...It was tough regardless. She was extremely lucky. So good luck to him.
Morphic Tide
Well-known member
And conversely, caseless rifles have much more compact ammunition for magazine capacity and bulk shipping. It's a performance vs. logistics issue, and the US military is one of the worst places in the world for one wishing to trade the current state of the former for the latter.
Carrot of Truth
War is Peace
One of the big problems with the HK G11 was that the caseless ammo was really fragile, Not sure how that problem can be overcome.
Well, Textron was well on the way to making such a rifle, but they apparently ran into some problems with their polymer telescoped round firing rifle. It seems to work just fine out of machine guns, from what I've seen.
Not sure what the problem was, but I'm pretty sure Steyr didn't have it with their 1980s ACR rifle, which is basically the same thing.
Morphic Tide
Well-known member
...This has me wondering just how useful a plastic explosive based caseless small arm could be. Depending on the details, you might be able to put in a big block of plastic explosive that has the appropriate amount shaved off, then a separate magazine of projectiles has one pulled from it to be put in the front, all pressed into shape by the chamber.
But that's dependent on getting a plastic explosive with the right detonation profile made, and very complicated. I could see a boondoggle shotgun using it to make shot-switching practical, maybe a tank cannon variation, but those are the only two cases where the relative trivializing of mixing different shots and amounts of propellant would work right. And in the tank case the system might work out more as assemble-in-situ reusing a much smaller set of true shells because fuck redesigning the turret around the all-new breach assembly for large-scale fully-caseless.
Carrot of Truth
War is Peace
Its probably somehow possible, I personally think the next big revolutionary thing for weapons will be when someone finally creates a badass battery that makes EMG's feasible. It will be a game changer for cannons and small arms.
If it's for the shooting in the air, it's at least understandable (again, rare but nonzero chance of bullet at terminal velocity harming someone ((and weird fact, because terminal velocity is what matters, the smaller the caliber, the higher the terminal velocity & the lower the threshold for skin puncture. Hence smaller caliber = more dangerous to shoot straight up.))). But knowing CA, it'll likely before some sort of assault charge or something stupid on the thief.