Adventures in My Mind

Darksome concept, that. Random thoughts!

• Apparently in the first Halo, the assault rifle held 60 rounds per magazine. They reduced it later to 32, probably because people said "How, exactly, do they all fit?"
  
  Only, casket magazines. Casket magazines, also known as quad-column, pack four rows of cartridges side-by-side, rather than the two of typical "double column" magazines. The four columns narrow to two partway down, so the casket still fits into normal-sized magazine wells.
• Also, the Halo battle rifle's round, 9.5×40 mm, is compared, at the Halo wiki, to the Russian 9×39 mm, but those were subsonic, designed to be fired from a dedicated suppressed rifle (the Soviets were big on those).
  
  But I think the battle rifle's performance is probably more similar to a Spitzer version of the .375 Winchester big-game round, which is 9.5×51 mm. Presumably 26th century propellants are up to the task of getting the same ballistic performance from an 11-mm shorter case.
• Remember when I said base-20 numerical systems are mostly associated with people who don't wear shoes? I think I have to amend that, because the Celtic languages were base-20 (that's why French does the diabolical things it does with numbers over 60, they're the most Celtic Romance language). Basque, too, is vigesimal, and some linguists theorize that's where it comes from in Indo-European.
  
  Apparently some of the Scandinavian languages also use vigesimal, namely Danish, but in general, Germanic languages are decimal. It is, however, either from Germanic or from Roman culture that we get the duodecimal elements in European numbers, like dozens, grosses, and, in Germany, masses (12³, i.e. 1728). Duodecimal numbers are, incidentally, apparently useful when counting one-handed: you count off the knuckles of your fingers, using your thumb.
• Speaking of numerical bases, have you seen this joke?

  Why do mathematicians get Halloween and Christmas mixed up?
  
  Because 31 Oct=25 Dec!

  Ah, nerd humor.
• I think I'm going to have to add some form of cooling system to my humans' guns, since caseless rounds involve a lot of heat difficulties, even if, like the HK G11, they have a higher ignition temperature than conventional propellants (the G11 still uses percussion firing, while future caseless designs are likely to use electronic).
  
  I had toyed with water- and air-cooling, perhaps with the gun opening up like the Covenant guns in Halo when they overheat, but I think I'm going to go with each magazine having a coolant reservoir in its lining—caseless rounds, remember, being shorter than their cased counterparts. And the 24th-century equivalent of SAAMI/CIP/NATO EPVAT standards specifies that a magazine has to contain sufficient coolant in its reservoir to balance the waste heat of emptying the thing all at once, at its maximum pressure (that is, it has to be sufficient cooling to prevent a round from cooking off, even if the magazine is emptied out as fast and hot as theoretically possible).
  
  Huh. I'm guessing you'd still want interchangeable barrels on machineguns, though.
• Also, I don't know if I mentioned it, but despite being caseless, the humans' guns still have what seems to be an ejector gate, but only for clearing dud rounds (which, of course, still happen). The slide, too, still exists, but its only function is as a charging handle, for chambering the first round.
  
  Revolvers (in this setting restricted to use by some police, mainly detectives and as a backup weapon) are tricky for caseless, but not impossible. Basically you have to use moon-clips.
• Cartoon Network's new animated Green Lantern show is pretty good. It's really shaping up to seem like Marvel makes better movies and DC makes better shows, although the Green Lantern movie wasn't bad at all. Maybe it's just that DC's settings are so much more complex.
  
  Also, people who complained about the CGI in the movie: guess what, shitheads, the Corps is 99.888...%—3596/3600, or 899/900—non-human. And sorry, but guys in suits won't cut it.
• Remember when I said Mass Effect should've called the eponymous phenomenon "Casimir-induced exotic matter"? Yeah. Well, apparently they get the effect, and their psionic "biotic" powers, from, get this, "Element Zero". Which, uh, you guys do know that an element's atomic number is determined by the number of protons in its nucleus, right? So "Element Zero" sounds cool, but it makes no sense. A nucleus with 0 protons is, well, either a neutron...or "nothing". It's not an element because it has no atoms, and therefore cannot have an atomic number. It would essentially not interact with electric fields.
  
  You Fail Science Fiction Writing Forever. Also your interspecies romances and knocking off the plots of Battlestar Galactica and (and not just because BSG was originally a Mormonized version of it) Fred Saberhagen's Berserker stories.
• Am I the only one who thinks that people who pronounce "Nyan", as in the Pop Tart cat, to rhyme with Ryan, should be shot?
  
  It's the Japanese word for "meow", you chuckleheads, it's a Vocaloid song. Yes, the fact it's Hatsune Miku singing it makes it a lot less irritating, don't you agree?