I daresay most of the world knows the meaning of 101, more than know of Room 101...

I would have to say that, here in the UK, it is known that it means 'basic training' or some analogue, but I don't know why. It has come up in US films enough that people pick it up, like '411' (or even '911') and the woeful mispronunciation or tourniquet.

Okay, I'll bite. How do you guys say it?

We say "tor-ni-kay", like the French word it is. But that wasn't my point, my point was simply that American culture is well-known in the more civilised parts of the world.

Er, now to get back on topic...

"You homo sapiens and your guns."

I do not wish to turn this into a discussion about politics any more than about gun culture or gun control, but I do think this needs some perspective (might as well link Wikipedia, since CCP will have blocked all similar sites). Visiting that place made me feel quite a bit more lucky for having been born where I was.

That's "tour" as in Tour de France, right? Where's the stress supposed to be? You'll find more use for French when you run into flechettes and sabots.

Hmm... yes and no. But you get the jist of it.

Anglophones pronounciate "tour" as in: "I went on a tour." The "r" is from the throat, like a german "r" more or less.

Ah yes, Fléchettes and Sabot. My french could also prove to be useful If I went to the restaurant and ordered some aubergine a la carte as I was on a rendez-vous for some serious espionnage.

Okay, this is a solar system away from guns. Oh well, french is fun (if useless). Ah I forgot, girls like french.

That is accent more than anything else, I think. Besides, we still speak French better than the Swiss. I have a Swiss friend and the accent makes her nigh-unintelligible. They speak it slower there but so badly slurred...

Completely agreed...I have no idea why people pigeonhole sex into a category along with violence. They're complete and total opposites. When I have children, I know that I won't let the media raise them like the vast majority of you likely have been - they'll learn the truth. Violence has its place - honestly the best solution for some things really to just slug it out - but lethal weapons ARE horrible instruments of death. Sensationalize them all you want, but that's what they're for, hurting and killing people.

Sex on the other hand is a generally pleasurable experience between two consenting persons (hopefully adults but we all know what teenagers get up to). As long as it's not hurting anyone, it's generally a good thing for everyone involved. Religious puritans and the like probably won't agree with me, but I'm sure eventually they'll realize they're human beings...

They do actually. Finding a movie in its original version is closed to impossible, even in Beijing. So everything is dubbed with Chinese.

The first movie I saw at the Cinema was "Poseidon" with Kurt Douglas. It was sooo weird to hear Douglas "speaking" mandarin.

Let me tell you one thing. People can throw stones to China all they want, they have AMAZING martial arts movies. Amazing I say.

Nothing close in the west comes close to Chinese marital arts, nothing. Well maybe Jackie Chan and Jet Lee, but we all know where they're from.

PS: To pursue on a my off topic crusade, did you know Jackie Chan was a singer before he was a martial artist? He came to sing in a city I worked in. Everyone expected kickass kung fu, but no, it was very slow apparently.

That and a Skill of 12, sure.

~J

Dammit! And here all along I kept saying to my self "___ youll NEVER need physics after college".

Now why did we go from guns, to French 101? Sure they made the FAMAS, but other then that, stick with the wine.

And I live in puriten Massuchusetts, so sex = bad. Guns too. Booze too. That dosent stop me from enjoying them all (though quite sepratly).

Generally, most colleges rank their classes by recomended year, an arbitrary number possibly relating to depth, and order. A 101 class is a Freshman class, is the most basic class of its type, and is the first class in the series. This is usually followed by 102 which would usually use the same book, be taught by the same professor, and will usually begin where 101 left off.

Or the British "machine carbine"... It's all semantics. Alright, let's get this out of the way, for the record.

The first weapon designed for the role that is most often referred to as the "submachine gun" was the German MP18i, a shoulder-fired automatic weapon developed for clearing trenches during WWI, where ranges are relatively short and a compact, rapid-firing weapon is beneficial. The "MP" in MP18i stands for "Maschinen Pistole", obviously "machine pistol" in English, derived from the fact that the weapon fired 9x19mm pistol ammunition in full automatic mode. This designation persists in German vernacular, notably in HK's MP5 and UMP.

In 1921, shortly after WWI, US General John T. Thompson developed a weapon with a similar concept in mind and called it a "submachine gun". This designation persists in American vernacular, though the weapon concept has largely been replaced in the American market by the shortened assault rifle, or what is commonly referred to as a "carbine", due to the proliferation of body armor and the inability of pistol ammunition like the 9x19mm or .45 ACP to defeat it.

In the American market, the term "machine pistol" tends to refer to an actual hand-fired pistol that has been designed to fire fully automatic, for example, the Glock 18. This concept has proven to be of very limited usefulness due to the difficulty in controlling the high rate of automatic fire from such a lightweight weapon, as well as the limitations of the ammunition's penetrative abilities, especially when fired from short pistol barrels.

For this reason, a new weapon class called the Personal Defense Weapon (PDW) was developed at the behest of NATO in the late 1980s to early 90's. These weapons are shoulder-fired and very compact in size, like a submachine gun (and were in fact derived from them), but fire unique high-velocity ammunition that can be described most aptly as a very small rifle cartridge. Examples of this class include the FN P90 and the HK MP7.

I find it rather odd that anyone thinks that they can so easily name moral standards for the bulk of europe. After all, Europe consists of 700 million people, in perhaps a dozen bigger countries and three dozen smaller ones, most of them with with it's own culture, national identity, beliefs and a history that dates back hundreds and, in a few cases, thousands of years.
Of course I can believe that some people believe that:).

Incidentally, just yesterday I was walking down the street, when I saw a swedish soldier (actually, there were two, but I ignored the male one).
She had no firearms, but a nice pair of boobies.
The bulk of Europe can surely agree on that.

[history major]Actually armour stuck around quite prominently on the battlefield for a good 200 years after the appearance of the firearm and its disappearance has far less to do with it's effectiveness or alleged lack there of than most people assume. Full suits of armour known as Cuirassier armour were still worn as late as the English Civil War in the 1650's and French and English heavy cavalry still wore breastplates throughout the Napoleonic wars.

Early guns were fairly low velocity weapons and provided you wern't shooting someone at point blank range a halfway decent 14-16 gauge piece of angled steel had a reasonable chance of turning the shot. If you manage to find decent pictures (or better yet a real artifact) of a early gunpowder era breastplate you should see a dent somewhere in the chest. That was called the "proof mark" and it was put there as a finishing touch to the piece when the armoursmith would invite his client to shoot the breastplate with a pistol from a set distance (usually 20 feet) to prove that it would protect him.

Now what, you ask, caused the disappearance of armour from the battlefield with 90% of armour disappearing by the end of the 17th century? Simple. National armies. By the end of the English Civil war equipping an army soon became the states responsibility and armour (especially full plate) was expensive, tailor made, and logistically impossible for even the wealthiest army to equip even it's officers with. Some units such as the aforementioned heavy cavelry retained limited armour, namingly breastplates which could be mass produced in 3 or 4 varying sizes (mostly to account for height differences) and through the use of varying sized straps could be bent, hammered and otherwise adjusted to fit by soldiers themselves.

The final blow to armour was the invention of a practical line infantry rifle. By line infantry I mean something that every soldier in the army carried like the model 1861 Springfield Rifled Musket, not just a few specialist units like the 95th rifles of Napoleonic fame. Rifles could achieve muzzle velocities unimaginable for a musket and retain their killing power over longer distances. Unlike muskets rifles did render every piece of armour obsolete until the invention of modern body armour.

Anyhow I’m through hijacking now. I’ll return you to talking about modern guns.[/history major]

My favorite ever was in South Africa, where there are laws about language content on television -- that is, a certain percentage of shows aired have to be in particular language. To make up this percentage, they use dubbed shows.

Enter, Rambo III in Zulu. THAT was a laugh-fest, make no mistake.

He was originally trained as a Beijing Opera performer, yah? For those who aren't family with his story, his parents sold him to the opera company. It's a particularly Chinese (dunno if it's actually from Beijing, or is specifically Cantonese) form which includes kung fu, acrobatics, singing, a certain kind of acting, etc. Other graduates of the same school include Sammo Hung and just about anyone called 'Corey' or 'Yuen' in HK film at the time (most students had a name that included 'Yuen' -- I forget what Jackie Chan's or Sammo Hung's names were, I just know that those are their stage names). Most of his classmates made at least one HK action film, and some ended up directing as well.

I have heard that he has a number of albums out. I also hear they aren't as bad as Leonard Nimoy.

Yes. Generally, recoil compensation works by using the high pressure gases of the muzzle blast and redirecting them in order to either compensate for the rise of the muzzle (in the case of relatively low-powered weapons like pistols and assault rifles) or the rearward thrust of the entire weapon (in the case of very high-powered rifles). In Shadowrun, these types of devices are called Gas Vents. In reality, they're known as compensators or muzzle brakes. Because the gases need to be at fairly high pressure in order to counteract the movement of the barrel, they are not compatible with sound suppressors (silencers), which operate by containing and lowering the pressure of the muzzle blast in order to decrease the sound.

Other means of recoil mitigation exist, such as soft rubber pads attached to the stock, internal buffers, and in the case of very heavy weapons, hydraulic buffers and rearward-facing exhaust systems.

Probably the most unrealistic aspect of SR autofire is that, in real life, the first bullet is just as likely to hit on-target, whether you're firing on full auto or single shot, all other things being equal (same stance, etc).

I've never run a system without modding it, but I'm still working on my SR autofire rules. The main thing is I don't want to make them too complex -- the system's nice and unencumbered, so I don't want to harm that.

there are two ways to look at it. the first is to say the first round fired in a burst is the most likely to be a hit, because that's the round that gets out of the barrel before the recoil has a chance to screw up your aim. this makes sense... if you're using autofire inefficiently. if you've got time to draw a proper bead and really aim at a single target, you might want to consider flipping over to burst or single-shot in most cases. 1-3 rounds is plenty for most people; it's nice to be sure, yes, but you can be just as sure pumping five single shots into a target as he goes down as you could be pumping a full ten-round burst into him.

the other way to look at it is that basically every round you fire in a burst will have roughly the same chance of hitting your target. this is, basically, intelligent use of spray-and-pray firing, and is what automatic weapons are designed to do. god didn't give us autofire because he wanted us to put lots of bullets into a target; he gave us autofire because firing lots of bullets at a target gives you a better chance of hitting that target with one bullet. any bullets that hit the target beyond the first are just gravy, an added bonus. in order to use autofire efficiently (and the efficiency i'm talking about here is ratio of guys you kill to guys who kill you), you won't be taking the time to aim properly--not the way you'd aim if you were using single shots, anyway. you get a quick sight picture and you pull the trigger; the recoil rattles the weapon around a bit, and you get a spread of fire vaguely similar in end result (and use) to the cone of pellets that a shotgun puts out. more bullets in the air = more chance of hitting what you're shooting at.

It's just the use of a rotating object to prevent an object from turning.

Take a bicycle wheel for example. Set it spinning. Put a vector force in one direction on a point on the wheel; remember that the force will stay in that direction on that point as it spins. This creates a torque.

If it spins fast enough, the wheel will move that force around the wheel... and when it gets to the opposite side of the wheel, the force will be generating a torque in the opposite direction of the torque generated at the original side of the wheel.

This force will be somewhat reduced, dependant on how fast the wheel is spinning; the faster it spins, the less the force decreases when it gets to the opposite side.

Basically, this effect is (part of) what causes a moving bicycle to be more stable (you've noticed that, right?) and could be how a cyber-arm gyro would work -- a set of weights pops out of the arm on rigid spokes (kind of like a bicycle wheel) and sets to spinning.

Trying to "turn" the arm by exterting a torque through the center of the wheel is going to be resisted as the torques shift around that wheel and change direction.

It's theoretically possible. I don't know if it's practical though.

Go google "angular momentum", if you want to know the physics of it.

more bullets in the air = more chance of hitting something

Yeah. But, see, you point the gun in the right direction before all that "trigger pulling" stuff starts.

Yes, those weapons could penetrate plate mail.

However, plate mail and other heavy armor had already been made obsolescent by the English longbow. Heavy cavalry (plate mail and lance) was also stymied by infantry squares with pikes.

The musket helped kick plate mail out the door, but it was already on the way.

Wikipedia: Longbow
Archers.org: A Short History of the English Longbow
700 Years of Longbows in War

Not all plate armor is (was) created equal. Longbows along with arrows with bodkin points seemed to have worked out at the Battle of Crécy.

...actually, in SR4 the sniper rifle is listed as having a 1.5km maximum range. This is probably where I got the number from.

Doesn't explain why french cuirassiers wore their, ehrm, cuirasses even at the beginning of World War I.

Another thougth:
There are even recoil amplifiers out there .

...i'll have to remember this when the sammie in my campaign gets his hands on an assault cannon for the first time.

Certainly some cheaper suits of armor were made with plates of unhardened substandard steel that might have been vulnerable to the heaviest armor piercing arrowheads at close range. In Crécy, however, just like in Agincourt (of which I just read a great account in John Keegan's The Face of Battle), archers wreaked havoc on heavy cavalry by injuring and killing their horses. On a muddy field, a violently dismounted, very heavily armored knight with no protection from his fellows is at a pronounced disadvantage. At Agincourt, there was apparently minimal losses on the advancing French infantry from the fire (some of it at very close range) of the longbowmen.

RainOfSteel: I find it interesting that the Wikipedia article says contemporary crossbows were as powerful but not "widespread" -- sure, they were only used throughout Europe, while large military formations of longbowmen seems to have been a mostly English (or British) phenomenon. I am not quite prepared to believe the claims of the Archers of Ravenwood and Suite101 articles about perfect penetration of any and all plate armor at up to 100 yards with no citations and with every historical account and serious study I've seen stating very much the opposite.

Style and tradition? Might have been of marginal use vs. shrapnel, and vs. small arms fire at extreme ranges.

I read the bit about archery at Agincourt again in Keegan's book and a few references elsewhere, and I'll admit that it's more likely than what I said above. But that it will "probably" penetrate seems a bit of a stretch when there still seems to have been rather few casualties in such battles where longbowmen fired thousands of arrows directly at the enemy at ranges well under 100 yards. The curving, though, certainly made a huge difference.