JsARCLIGHT

I think the modern day switch to clear plastic mags has sort of done that. Easy to know how much ammo is left just by looking at the magazine. I can name about ten weapons off the top of my head that where built specifically with clear mags and I can name even more than have gotten them as aftermarket additions. They've made some massive steps forward with plastics these days. Then again even the older weapons all had some way of knowing how many rounds where in your weapon. 1911's had inspection holes as do Uzi mags and many others. Albeit they require you to pull the mag out and look at it but it sure helps. A big factor in a "digital readout display" on a weapon is the fragility of it. Most main line combat weapons are supposed to be hard as nails, drop them from a helicopter and they still work weapons. That line is getting blurred more and more today with all these fancy futureguns that people think we need... yet old war horses like the AK47 keep soldiering on. All that fancy holosight, led, flashlight rangefinder crap works just fine in tests and on a rifle range but in combat it's just one more thing that can break and possibly put you at risk. Heh, that was actually ammolab.com's opinion and not mine. I myself have faith in the .40 S&W round.

Any movie where they kill off Gary Busey is good enough for me. The way I see it, Predator 2 is far better than Alien 3 and Resurrection. My main complaints about Pred2 are mostly in how cliche it is. The script is pure '80s hollywood stereotype from start to finish... I always saw Pred2 as the last gasp of the true '80s bloodbath makes-no-sense guns-a-blazin' movies. That and to this day I cannot help but laugh out loud when I watch that movie... it is because when I first saw it I was still in the army and I and my friends in the brigade saw it in germany a while after it came out and we were riffing on it to beat the band. The scene where he kills the one Jamacan leader and then there is a quick cut to him polishing the skull for some stupid reason I blurted out "He's makin' him a milkshake!" which instantly caused all of us to laugh our asses off and get "shooshed" by the others in the room. "He's makin' him a milkshake" became our little overused joke for the next year for any and all situations. "Where's Jarel?", "He's makin' him a milkshake!". "What have you guys been doing all day?", "Makin' milkshakes". It was just so stupid yet we loved it so. Thank you Predator 2 for letting us laugh about decapitation and skull trophy polishing.

Personally I'm still not sold on the civilian P90... I guess I just have a built-in prejudice against those weapons... but the F2000 looks boss so far and actually stands a better chance of getting made than the civvie P90. Plus if it does turn out to use AR mags like everyone is saying and take flat top picatinny sights then I'll be all set. Compared to the clumsy and blockish Bushmaster M17 the civie F2000 is a work of art.

Keep your AR mags as the civvie F2000 will run them they say.

... and as promised my new toy, complete with Gemtech Moussad suppressor (which I have to give back to my friend as civilians are not allowed to legally own them in this state ).

And one shot of the "civilian" F2000.

Second of the P90

Some more recent pics of the grey and green Civilian P90 and F2000 are floating around from another show. These are bigger and easier to see. Keep in mind these are the prototypes and are rumored to be mock-ups only.

Well this piece of info may somewhat put your mind at ease: The wounding capability in comparison of the SS192 when fired from the Five SeveN USG to the standard 124gr 9mm Speer jhp+p loading as issued to the NYPD and fired from the Glock G19 duty pistol is roughly 40% with a large reduction in overall wound size, depth, diameter, and soft tissue volume. The SS192 ammunition provides for much faster energy loss and provides a significantly lower risk of target over penetration and secondary target contact/over penetration while also providing for a significant reduction in risk of ricochet thus making it statistically a safer pistol in many aspects for the civilian end user. (info from ammolab.com's article on the 5.7 versus 9mm) As for bullets penetrating NIJ level IIa vests I can say without a doubt that there tons of rounds that will blow clean through that grade of vest. Albeit most of them are larger caliber rifle rounds but in a sense the 5.7 is a cutdown 5.56 assault rifle round and possesses the same kinetic force penetration capabilities to a good degree. The non AP SS192 training ammo is basically the same thing as it's bigger brother just "detuned" with a different bullet in it. In all honesty it underperforms compared to 9 mil and .357 sig rounds and is more akin to a .22 magnum round. In the right conditions even a .22 mag can penetrate level IIa vests. Level III with a trauma plate is another story all together. The thing that modern society seems to forget about (or just plain ignore) these days is that ballistic vests are designed to give the wearer a "second chance" when being shot... they are not 100% effective in all cases and situations. I have seen time and again tests in person and in video of several grades of ballistic vest blown clean through by common ammo when the right set of variables come into play. As always, "body armor" should not be seen as the instant bullet stopping invulnerablity cloak that people make it out to be. (I know Graham knows all this I'm just soapboxing for those that don't).

Considering the show is written and done mostly by Tom Root and the guys from Toyfare magazine who do the "Big Shots" and "Twisted Mego Theater" bits all Robot Chicken is is more of the same... with with the very unfunny and annoying Seth Green in charge. And much like all those Big Shots and Twisted Mego Theaters from Toyfare, Robot Chicken is about 70% filler material... most of the jokes are stale, cheap or just downright dated or overused. The few things they do right usually either go on too long and loose a good deal of the humor they started with or they just stretch a premise way beyond the levels of humor and cross into very bad taste more often than not. If anything, the show's machine-gun editing style actually helps it hide the fact that it has very little actual material in each episode. Most of the episodes I have seen have one or two "Twisted Mego Theater" bits, meaning sketches that last a few minutes and really stretch a premise as far as it will go (such as Kill Bunny, The N'Sync thing, Voltron being "served") and then they fill the rest of the time with those tiny two to three second "Big Shots" that for the most part are completely unfunny and are basically there to take up space. I would seriously bet their writing sessions involve them just sitting around a table and blurting stuff out and writing it all down... No fart joke, crotch punch, sex humor or barf joke left unused. Lowbrow entertainment at it's best. As a wise comic once said: if you can't be a Letterman, be a Leno. In the end, if you have read an issue of Toyfare magazine and looked at all the little immature cartoons featuring toys doing stupid things then you have seen Robot Chicken.

Most of what Impact has listed on their site is rumored to be just that, rumor. I know they have changed that info several times to reflect the current state of rumor on the weapon. Most people are taking what they say with a grain of salt. FN USA, the company who is to make the weapon is being very tight lipped right now because even they do not know if the civilian P90 is going to be made or not. There are a lot of rules the weapon has to abide by to be made legal for sale in the US and FN has yet to announce how they plan to follow those. As for the ammo question the Civvie P90 is in the same boat as the Five seveN pistol (called the IOM in the US)... the only ammo available is that ball training round, non AP. But the weapons can still chamber and fire the restricted AP ammo and that is what all the gun grabbers are obsessing on and the big reason these things may be banned before they even hit the streets. Oh and it goes without saying: don't preorder something until you actually see it. Several people have been burned on "vaporware" firearm preorders in the past. Impact was taking deposits originally to preorder the civvie P90 but a lot of complaints and questions about the weapon prompted them to stop and instead just start a waiting list for them. They, of course, will probably deny that but there was quite the hullabaloo on AR15.com about them and this weapon a while back.

That finger cocking chinese job is an accident waiting to happen in my eyes as well... just because it works in sci fi does not mean it is a good idea in real life. Trigger and cocking trigger so close together... As for one handed reload cocking, the dependable and very sweet H&K P7M13 / M8 is the best of the best in that respect. I managed to lay my hands on a M13 a while back... blued of course. Nice little guns, mechanical works of art. Too bad they are so freaking expensive and banned from further importation. Fastest reload and shoot money can buy, the best C&C weapon on the market. Anything else attempting to cycle a slide with a lever or button is just clumsy at best... thus why no one really tries to do it anymore. As for the civvie P-90 I keep hearing october this year as a release date... however that date as well as the actual release of it or not are still up in the air. Several key factors in the weapons' legal status are still pending and no one I have talked to has heard anything about it passing the BATF for legal sale in the US yet. A lot of mechanical changes are needed to make the weapon besides the longer barrel for legality, so basically the civilian P90 will be a completely different animal than the real submachine gun. Rumors keep flying around that the civvie version will not take the SMG mags and will only take special US made lower capacity magazines. Even more rumors are bouncing around that they will have to be 100% built in the US to be legal... For all we know congress could ban the 5.7 round (along with .50 cal rifles) before the thing even comes out and make all of this a moot point. There are several house bills in action right now to do just that.

I own a beta C. My advice is if you are getting it as a range toy they are fine... but they have a few quirks that make them not too stable for use in the field. Thanks to the end of the ban they are actually affordable now, if you consider $300 affordable for a magazine. Two pieces of advice on them though, don't loose that loader tool and make sure you lube up the mag regularly. Beta C's seem to only like to load using that five round pusher they come with... don't try to use a line loader or a bushmaster zip loader as for some reason trying to load more than five rounds at a time causes the internal mechansim to bunch up. Handloading a Beta C is nearly impossible... you can load about ten rounds by hand before it becomes too tight to handload. And always use the graphite lube how the little booklet says every now and then to keep the rollers inside lubed. Oh and it goes without saying: Beta C mag dump = BAD. I've seen trigger happy folks burn paint off of muzzle breaks, melt handguards and even cook barrels by doing 100 round dumps out of their Betas.

It was such a nice weekend here that I also went to the range. I've had a busted arm for a few weeks now and this was the first time I felt decent enough to try my arm out on the range so I went. Nothing special here, took out the AR A1 and my G21 for some "fundamentals" shooting. The range here was packed so I only had an hour of range time before getting booted. I also just got word that the paperwork came through on my Vector Uzi so that should be comming into my grubby possession next week or the week after. I might post a pic of it if people are interested, but everyone knows what an Uzi looks like so it won't be anything special. I like the idea of Basara targets... I printed up some Bin Laden targets for my cop friends and they loved them. Back before my unfortunate arm accident I and my friends shot the crap out of an old lawnmower and other things. It's an unspoken feeling of joy to do mag dumps on an old central park lawnmower... and then when one of my friends pulled out his Barrett and just smoked the engine it was a sight to behold. (JsARCLIGHT takes off his gomer hillbilly hat)

But Gold leader, being killed in the first trench run, would have been called out by name by Gold Five when he says "Lost Tiree, Lost Hutch". Either Tiree or Hutch are Gold leader and if all these pilots are as buddy-buddy as they seem (pilots calling each other by first names rather than callsigns such as Biggs, Wedge, Luke, Porkins, Tiree, Hutch, etc.) they would know that Gold leader was dead. I still think this was an editing mistake made by the editor, placing the non-sequetor "Copy, Gold Leader" clip into the scene just to flesh it out more. Visually and thematically it flows, but contextually it is somewhat dubious.

Doesn't Luke take a solid engine hit as well? I'd say Red Leader lost two engines. Doesn't he also say he lost his "starboard" engine and he is shown taking the hit in his left (port) engine? No sure, been a while since I saw that clip.

At the end of ANH one Y-wing is seen speeding away with the Falcon, Luke's X-wing and Wedge's X-wing... so one lone Y-wing did survive. That being the case, Gold FIVE (I found the script online and the script says it is Gold Five that says those lines coming out of the trench) would have been Gold leader for all of three seconds before he himself got waxed by the baddies. Then that means that last Y-wing would have been Gold leader, flight 1 of 1. As for the whole "Copy, Gold leader" blurb it always appeared to me that it was just a single clip of footage that was inserted in the editing process. You can take that clip out of the scene and it will still make perfect sense... but with it IN the scene it puts a whole different slant on what Gold Five says.

Back in the day and last time I saw the movie I clearly hear "Carrie"... then again who am I to go against the illustrious Mr. Burtt and his infinite wisdom. ... then again I also noticed a lot of other dialogue "goofs" in ANH that no one else seems to hear but me that have been "discredited" and overexplained by fanboys. Edit: one of my personal favorite "only JsARCLIGHT hears it" audio flubs is when the Y-wings get pasted in the death star trench and Gold leader gets blown to dogfood and Gold three (or two, which I forget) leaves the trench and says "Lost Tiree, Lost Hutch. It came from... behind" and you hear one of the red boys say "copy, Gold leader" even though Gold leader is in pieces on the death star trench. Now it could be argued that they instantly promoted Gold three to Gold leader (because there was one other surviving Y-wing out there for him to lead) for the five seconds he lived before getting pasted himself but that just seems dumb.

Ah the helmet bashing in ANH... I have fond memories of noticing that long ago in a galaxy far far away before the internet (1983 when I got the OT on VHS with my first VCR) and pointing it out to friends. Not a one of them believed me until they saw it with their own eyes. Edit: that single flub egged me on to find all the other "mess ups" in AHN back then... there are actually a ton of them that I found but only a few turned out to be actual "flubs" like Mark Hamill blurting out "Carrie!" or Vader's silver fencing foil.

hmmm... that review Graham posted a link to is quite disconcerting... I guess nothing in this day and age can be made without totally playing to the idiots out there. The question remains though, have we as a viewing audience actually gotten stupider over time or were the great Sci-Fi masterworks of the late '70s and early '80s just so much better and smarter than they are today? Could it be argued that "motion picture cloning" has resulted in the future generations of once greatness being so horribly mutated that they have become stupid (using Michael Keaton's "Multiplicity" as an example)? I still have hope that the movie will have a few redeeming things in it. Until I myself personally watch it and storm out of the theater in a fit of rage due to it's badness I will hold out hope. (runs away and starts re-watching his BBC miniseries DVDs again for the hundredth time)

Star Wars needs more Cowbell. Agree to disagree.

Too much chrome... Waaaaaaay too much chrome. I'm with Max, Ghost Rider's "slab sided" bike is the one I think of when I think "what does Ghost Rider ride?"

Here in Saint Louis we get HD Net 1 & 2, Sho, Hbo, ESPN and the networks (NBC, CBS, FOX) and we are supposed to be getting (for some stupid reason) the WB in HD. No TNT HD, No Discovery HD... the two channels I want. At least it's not all bad. I'm laid up with the flu right now and I got to sit on the couch and watch Dog Day Afternoon on HDNet for the past two hours.

Looks like you went with the cable (noticing the Motorolla box). How many HD channels in your area? TNT HD perhaps?

ArcLight theater?!? My Theater? Star Wars dorks camping out in front of my theater? (racks shotgun) I ain't takin' that!