That's rebel propaganda. The Stormtroopers had no trouble boarding Tantive IV and people seem to selectively ignore the scenes proving that the rebels were permitted to escape the Death Star so they could be tracked to their secret base.
It’s a Ruger AR-556 Whiteout, pretty much stock excepting the custom dust cover and muzzle device. Got the bit on the end from Canto Arms. Same guys that made my blaster.
Already had the white Olight and the 45° canted adapter. Not a “weapon” light, but it works! Literally drop kicked the gun to test, many times. Slammed it on the ground, many times. Works fine.
Best part, I got a standard 30-round mag advertised as “Stormtrooper White”. :) The 10-round mags are easier to use for a few reasons, even though standard mags are not banned around here.
Thanks for the reference that blaster also looks really cool! I might have to copy you cause that gun looks sick and Im jealous lol. Right now I got an AR10 chambered for .308, I like it for hunting but for target shooting not so much. A 556 variant would probably be a lot better for that
I feel you on the mag size, 30 rounds aren’t banned where I’m at either and they look nicer (especially that stormtrooper white you mentioned, oh man that’d look so cool!) but I also use a 10 round cause of how much better it feels and makes it easier to use.
There are adapters that can go into the frontsightpost to mount a light, or rails that can be fitted onto the clamshell handguard. Or a mount like this. Much better places for a light to be accessed by the hand.
The sling can be rerouted through the stock like so. Without buying additional adapters the front of the sling can be mounted to the frontsightpost with nothing more than a little bit of gutted 550 cord like so. The advantage of doing this is that if you take your hands off the rifle while it is slung to your front, the rifle will not try to flip upside down awkwardly.
I will admit that the blaster looks pretty cool. But I will probably always feel a bit weird about weapons being played with and customised in that way.
Like, if I saw a weapon like that I would assume it’s for cosplay and not for killing people.
It’s not very likely that I will ever see a weapon like that though since weapons are strictly controlled where I live. So outside of museums and military contexts, the only weapons I have seen are hunting rifles.
AR and derivatives are undeniably the best platform in almost every category. Ambi/left support is kinda a cludge, and STANAG is an okay magazine. That’s about the limits of the platform’s problems nowadays, the rest have been fixed
All the big advancements in the small arms arena are in electro-optics. Firearms have plateaued long enough that quibbling over a better gun isn’t the best place to throw R&D (or for that matter, procurement) money at. Buy all your troops RDS/LPVO for everyone, then Vis/IR laser.
I genuinely can’t tell if you’re having a stroke and can’t form a sentence, or are making some smartass comment about .300 BLK/9x39/etc
There’s a lot of physics that make ‘pistol bullet what goes heckin fast’ incredibly hard, if not pointless. Metallurgy, internal & external ballistics, case web separation, a valid reason why…
Russia would have had a fair shot if history repeated identically until the instant before d-day. Germany had had its supply lines crumble and their men were approaching child soldier levels of experience. Not to mention Hitler going partway down the path of the god complex and fully down the path of the meth addict after cancer ravaged his system. Not a historian but Russia would have had a fair shot if they were alone. Coin flip or better.
There's a reason Stalin demanded a western front be opened, and it wasn't because he wanted to share credit for the victory over Nazi Germany with the Western Allies. Without D-Day or a similar opening of a western front, the Soviet advance would have been much slower, much bloodier, and the final outcome of their offensives much more dubious.
Italy was in a civil war from 43 on so there was already a foothold for Allies into mainland Europe.
But D-Day was a part of the Tehran agreements that also had USSR joining the war versus Japan after a German defeat. So the failures and victories of the Soviets and Allies cannot really be severed or separated… (credibly).
While you’re correct the advance would have been slower, bloodier, and with a more dubious outcome, we CAN surmise that the Allies failing to secure more of mainland Europe would have easily meant more area for the Soviets to have occupied in the vacuum inevitably left by the collapse of Nazi Germany.
Might’ve had a North and South France instead of an East and West Germany.
Nah, “if D-Day failed” implies everything up to that point being unchanged save for bad planning, in that scenario the Soviets would have had the war materials the US had been sending them and which they had turned the invasion around using by that point.
You’d need to have failed landings along the Mediterranean as well before we get to the point where the Nazi commanders who didn’t have their heads up their own asses last estimated they could turn the momentum back against the Soviets, and at that point the question isn’t if Germany could win, it’s how far Stalin would be willing to go to take the initiative back again, because the earth is a globe, and if needed, the US and Canada could have deployed their troops into the Soviet Union to mount a reinforcement operation while the UK doubled down on supplying asymmetric resistance against the Nazis, and now we’re dealing with what Japan’s role as an acting defense against such a maneuver would be or if they’d even be willing to mount a defensive operation against such a troop movement purely for Germany’s benefit.
Then again we’ve gone so far down the rabbit hole now that we’ve run into the fact that the US would probably have deployed the bomb since Germany was their intended target in the first place anyways, so does Japan just fold seeing that the US can make nukes now after Berlin becomes a glass floor?
WWII is just so all over the damn place that any point falling the other direction spirals half a million what ifs, none of which end up being answered really well in alt-hist media purely because people just have a really hard time picturing all the angles of attack in a war that truly encompasses the whole world in scope.
No, the makeup of the Soviet military in WW2 was pretty proportional in terms of Ukrainians (and other minorities) to Russians. However, much of Ukraine was denied to the Soviet Union as a recruiting ground due to early Nazi successes, so one could argue that Ukrainians were overrepresented in comparison to the overall manpower that the USSR had at its disposal.
This seems unlikely given the population disparity between the Russians and Ukrainians (which was similar then as it is today) and the casualty figures. I can't find actual estimates of the ethnic breakdown of the army, but there are breakdowns of casualties by SSR. Obviously SSR is not a perfect analogue of ethnicity, but the numbers are far enough apart that I think it does the job here. Roughly 65% of military casualties were from Russia, 15% from Ukraine. Ukrainians were one of only two groups to be overrepresented as a proportion of casualty figures relative to their population though, the other being Belarusians.
Plenty more about to be delivered too. Eg. the first Belgian F35 rolled off the production line last week. Poland's set to start receiving theirs sometime next year.
That's the interesting thing about Ukraine. Putin's clearly delaying in the hopes of a Trump win and set his hope on attrition and numbers, but at the same time a lot of EU countries are going to have F16s they want to get rid of soon. Perhaps that's why the Russians have been threatening countries like Romania, trying to dissuade them from offering logistic support to Ukrainian F16s.
Should be interesting.
Bit of a tangent, but given that the F35 will replace the F16 as a nuclear bomber for the Netherlands and Belgium, and the Germans are replacing their tornados for the same reason, I wonder if Poland might at one point become part of the nuclear sharing agreement with the US. They'll have the planes to drop them. Kinda makes sense with Kaliningrad being a thing.
Well unfortunately the first part is starting to be proven right, the Ukrainians are starting to give in to the sheer pressure of the infinite manpower of the Russian army.
Infinite how? Both countries have millions of military aged men, before either country actually runs out of manpower there would have to be a hundred Stalingrad battles. Clearly the population amount is not the bottleneck here. For either of them to use manpower as a “weapon” they’d have to throw naked men at machine guns hoping that bullets can’t be resupplied faster than they can draft.
Russia like any other nation has a very limited amount of manpower that they can leverage before consequences start to hit. So far they have avoided another mobilisation, but if the numbers dwindle enough they’ll have to do it and that is going to be very unpopular. They can’t afford to grind their men the way they’re doing but they’re doing it anyway, probably because they want to project the image of “endless manpower Russia” - if they can keep the farce long enough then maybe Ukraine’s allies will give up.
By believing this tankie nonsense you’re helping them. Don’t.
Russia has already started to try to find new sources of conscripts - estimates peg that between 40 to as much as 75% of the originally eligible are dead or got the hell outta Dodge. This is potentially why they just criminalized homosexuality - “you’re gay, you either go to prison for life (where you will likely be killed) or you get conscripted. Your choice”. Shit, they asked North Korea of all places for soldiers.
noncredibledefense
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.