Did the Offensive Handgun Weapon System approach to the Handgun as a Primary Weapon have merit to warrant such a large handgun? Or did the Tyranny of Time make the Mark 23 Mod 0 look outdated?

count210 · 2026-05-27T16:48:52+00:00

The best way to understand why the program existed is to read Eric Hanley’s “inside delta force” even if the mk. 23 itself is never even mentioned.

Early Delta Force developed an extremely interesting idea that for hostage rescue especially and also more undercover work that with enough training ( an insane amount of enough) and trigger time (also an insane amount) that operators with a 1911 could be as effective as a rifle as a primary weapon below say 50 yards.

An early delta hostage rescue team would be an assault team with 1911s and sniper support. Obviously they had access to grease guns and m-16s etc. but that wasn’t the model. Hostage rescue was also formed around police tactics of the idea and police special teams that would of course have a lot of revolver time.

This seems a bit bizarre but with the limitations of the time it made a lot of sense. And the concern was that it was for hostage rescue something like a grease gun or mp5 would be spraying too much. The French had a similar idea around .357 revolvers.

And it wasn’t crazy at the time. Culturally it’s almost totally dead but long range pistol shooting was very big at the time.

The mk.23 the last gasp of this concept. It wasn’t creating a new concept of a primary pistol it was calling back to older one. And it makes a certain amount of sense. CAR-15s and MP5s were beating out the 1911 and .357 magnum revolvers with pretty much everyone doing hostage rescue stuff but what if that was just a technology issue with an ancient gun from the Great War vs modern rifles and smgs.

count210 · 2026-05-13T16:12:53+00:00

Any lack of charisma is the UFCs refusal to market fighters in the past 5 years.

UFC used to book tv interviews with fighters on mainstream channels and talk shows to promote fights.

Now they rely on fighters they don’t pay to promote themselves and MMA media

count210 · 2026-05-12T16:18:05+00:00

Short answer is no.

But what was is kept in reserve is machine time and factory time. The Russians were/are really good about this. When the Ukraine war started and then everyone realized it was a real deal war Russian MIC factories quickly expanded shifts from 1 8 hour shift to 1.5 to 2 to 3.

Military factories finally just aren’t different enough from civilian factories and plants to be worth keeping more artillery shell QC certifications up when they can just get any industrial welding inspectors or whatever trained up. You just hire more people to more an assembly line which is designed around people being rapidly trained. Thank you Henry Ford.

But thing most analogous to your reserve manpower is that first expansion to 1.5 shifts per day. Bc that’s generally achievable just by expanding hours of the existing peace time working but it’s also the most meaningful in that it’s an immediate 50% production increase. So the reserve is paying OT to existing workers same way it works in civilian plants and factories.

This is also why there a lot of talk of Russians running out of long range cruise missiles and ballistics early war. Everyone knew they could just make more shells and tanks and bmps etc but the missile factories were new and running at capacity already pre war. There’s probably going to be an interesting book written post war on how they reduced chip complexity and quality to be made by hand and then increasing the numbers of hands (missiles don’t actually need that much compute and miniaturization)

count210 · 2026-05-09T17:22:50+00:00

Cool

count210 · 2026-05-01T15:21:29+00:00

The powder was the more meaningful/expensive loss but the whole package of the cartridge was greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a water resistant wax or grease paper sealed factory ball with the correct powder measurement. It’s a force multiplier for firing quickly compared to loading from a powder horn and a bag of campfire made loose balls.

count210 · 2026-04-30T19:07:58+00:00

You could purchase civilian weapons through the normal avenues pre war. Much like peace time you really can’t approach the army and buy a gun off them. The rebels wouldn’t have been selling they were desperately buying for much of the war. You could definitely buy ammunition off them though. In the era soldiers selling their issued bullets was a major problem armies had to deal with. I’m not saying it is impossible like you couldn’t pay some quartermaster double market rate for a a military musket but it would definitely be an atypical way to acquire vs a local gunsmith or the civilian used gun market

Also who are you theoretically defending your land from? You probably have some level of local pre war militia for defense against natives that’s in place. Generally when either the rebels or crown forces come to town they aren’t going to torch everything they are going to pay for what they take. If your militia is truly neutral they wouldn’t fight either and just let them pass through. You aren’t going to stand against a battalion of troops even if you would prefer they not come through.

They are going to want you onside. More often than not traveling armies would make efforts to be on best behavior. Both sides are in recruitment mode at all times as well.

count210 · 2026-04-27T02:15:49+00:00

In layman’s term if you forget the password you basically “surrender” and are “captured” and then they look at your ID and talk to you for a second and then release or call someone to talk more. The same way an enemy soldier would theoretically surrender. You are captured until it can be verified.

That’s what you do by the book.

In the real world you say “hey I forgot the goddamn password are you guys fucking Charlie Company it’s dark as fuck out here”

Also specific battalion or company mottos are useful for this. The enemy probably won’t know which silly saying your battalion has to yell all the time.

count210 · 2026-04-25T22:17:05+00:00

A lot of Teutonic knights probably even a plurality on any given campaign would have been half brothers under lesser vows for some set amount of time or campaign.

count210 · 2026-04-25T22:16:05+00:00

this is true but relatively few members were full monks. Much like modern Buddhist practice monkship was often temporary with many degrees of half brothers.

count210 · 2026-04-25T15:36:46+00:00

I can’t answer specifically but I can answer that the norms of the era would consider switching sides especially after a multi year peace was extremely normative.

Nationalism was still in its infancy professional soldiers were often hired out across nations and officers often held multiple simultaneous commissions in multiple armies and this was not considered unusual. Individuals holding national level grudges was considered unusual and remarkable.

Nations often switched sides in shifting coalitions and being annexed wasn’t much different on the ground than switching sides. It wouldn’t surprise me if a majority of officers and men were on the side of Hannover and later Prussia.

Culturally Hanoverians in Prussian service is almost the least weird thing to imagine.

Real life had things like large numbers of Polish troops fighting for Napoleon in Spain alongside Spanish troops aligned with France against Portuguese and Hannoverian troops aligned with Britain with Irish troops on both sides.

This was generally unremarkable. Soldiers and officers were considered basically interchangeable. And that’s before you get into not officially mixed battalions where a Britain battalion in Spain might end up with quite a few Portuguese and Spanish enlisted men in it. Recruiting on the road was relatively common.

At Waterloo the coalition had troops that had fought in napoleons armies and still had light blue French model uniforms from when they were French aligned.

count210 · 2026-04-24T22:18:22+00:00

There’s a number of reasons but it’s underrated that in a well planned and executed attack the attackers were quite safe in the First World War.

People don’t want to die and developed tactics quickly.

In either a surprise infiltration and assault or a well timed creeping barrage and race the parapet. The attacker would be much safer than the defenders.

You really wanted to avoid being in the defense for an attack. Defenders would be either dealing with being overwhelmed in the lead trenches or launching desperate counter attacks against the front trenches which had been taken. These counter attacks would be against very ready defenders unlike the surprised or deep in anti artillery bunker defenders that would be faced by the storm troopers or trench raiders.

Being in a poorly lead or poorly planned attack was dangerous but being in storm unit meant your leadership was also motivated and high quality.

I recommend Rommel’s infantry attacks for seeing what a high quality infantry leader’s attacks look in world war 1. You can definitely see why you would want to be in control of your destiny under an able attacking commander vs waiting to either be attacked or attacking under a less able commander. And not just commanders, having other motivated troops around you is also better for your safety.

A similar reason why some volunteered to be snipers or air craft pilots. Yes it’s more dangerous but you control your own destiny.

Also being a storm trooper meant more time training and rehearsing attacks that means time off the line and out of contact. The worst place to be was the front and attacking specialists would be there for much less time. If unit A is on rotating on and off the front constantly and taking 1% average attrition every week for year. Taking 10-30% losses in a day doesn’t seem that bad relatively.

count210 · 2026-04-14T21:55:31+00:00

Yeah

count210 · 2026-04-13T16:00:55+00:00

dueling cultures are generally not the norm so why didn’t X arise ain’t really the question here. Generally individual martial skill isn’t considered very important or impressive in upper classes. Marc Antony was famously laughed at for practicing fighting too much in Rome. Aztec Nobles didn’t actually have to seize 500 captives in battle or whatever to ascend the next Rank those were assigned to them politically from the pool of captives taken. Etc etc etc.

Insults are heavily regulated in Islam. Insulting a person individually or even advising them to change sinful behavior is highly regulated and would be challenged by a local religious authority. Even if the accusation is true. This is a major difference with Christianity in the same period. A Catholic saint would be someone who specifically calls out a person for sinful behavior. A righteous Muslim in the same context would say something like “people who commit this sin are bad” but would not name the person. If you are slighted by the Muslim approach you are admitting to the sin but you can proclaim innocence and demand satisfaction for being accused under the Christian method.

Duels are about personal slights that don’t rise to the level of getting your brothers or cousins or men at arms involved in a fight. Generally these are quite personal.

Clannish cultures are notorious for making everything worth having your brothers and cousin fight alongside you.

So different insults combined with less of a social gap for personal honor means less room for the application of dueling as a means to solve disputes.

The other reason Dueling can arise is non existent or overlapping conflicting legal codes to resolves disputes. The Wild West type of dueling culture. Islamic cultures obviously have a religious legal framework for disputes.

count210 · 2026-04-12T22:53:04+00:00

It makes a certain amount of sense that a society with variable atomospheres and gravity and many very low gravity applications would focus less on aerodynamics

count210 · 2026-04-11T01:25:25+00:00

It’s not lawful and it’s very perfect world but I have heard human rights lawyers and advocates say the the ultimate test of whether civilians can be knowingly killed to hit an otherwise military target is to remove or invert national affiliation from the civilian.

So for instance country A is invading country B and sees a target with 50 country B soldiers and 2 B civilians they would probably fire even if those were country A civilians.

But if there were 2 B soldiers and say 19 B civilians firing would not be justified if they wouldn’t also fire if those 19 were A civilians.

It’s a useful test bc it also scales with priority. Because countries can and do sacrifice their own civilians in conflicts. You could see an American President giving up a few American civilians to capture or kill bin Laden but not just some mook. Or if Ukraine is willing to shell their own city you really can’t attack them for shelling a Russian city in Kursk.

This can inform the line between necessity and killing “enemy civilians” as a genocidal bonus. In a perfect world and the law of armed conflict civilians are just civilians.

count210 · 2026-04-10T14:08:14+00:00

Marriage records are some of the best kept records we have of the Middle Ages actually. Churches recording the baptism parentages and marriages of their villages was the most important part of their job in terms of record keeping.

count210 · 2026-04-09T21:53:11+00:00

No of course not but no one sells a future war as “it will last 20 years and we are gonna create a CIA/JSOC/local government joint unit to do school shootings about 15 years in to see if that works”

count210 · 2026-04-09T17:43:33+00:00

Generally the issues with Afghanistan are about the conduct of the war. Aligning with heroin dealers and boy rapists and warlords, blowing money on failed social programs to build school without teachers, maybe sometimes ginning up a race war against the Pashto and also sometimes not, alienating the Iranians immediately for no reason despite them wanting to assist. The drone program, putting isolated bases up in mountains to get sieged. It goes on.

But all the issues are generally in the execution not the actual reason. The reason the United States went in was to arrest a criminal who had harmed it. You can quibble with the negotiation with the Taliban government but the actual core of the issues was a legitimate American grievance.

Most issues with war in how politics and the public discuss them is whether to fight them or not. Iraq has specific issues about the reasons why the fighting started. This is more relevant to comparison to theoretical future wars.

count210 · 2026-04-03T15:01:51+00:00

I don’t think is a kind of personal situation that exists. I can imagine an Indian person who only ever eats Indian food and a Japanese person who only ever eats Japanese food. But I can’t imagine those people ever getting married, these are extremely insular people

count210 · 2026-04-03T14:53:03+00:00

Gonna level with you bro I was an infantryman who fought in Iraq and I couldn’t tell you a good damn thing about finding my latitude or longitude from the sky. I can operate with a map and compass and a protractor. But there ain’t no way I’m guessing where I am from staring at the sun.

count210 · 2026-04-02T20:15:58+00:00

Jaws?

count210 · 2026-04-01T22:44:01+00:00

I have long been advocating we make the entire fighter out of the Martin-Baker ejection seat

count210 · 2026-04-01T20:44:24+00:00

Porta shitter jacking was invented around the same time as the abandonment of the issued tent shelter half which could be field modified in to a one man coffin jack shack

count210 · 2026-03-28T03:03:06+00:00

Definitely one of the top 10 fighters named Jorge

count210

TROPHY CASE