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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26627 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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A nuclear warhead isn't a big gun, it's a big bomb. Bombs explode roughly equally in every direction. Bullets travel in a forward line. That's their main distinction.

hence the quotes on "gun" above. Both are weapons, which is the point under discussion. The comment above assumes that big weapons invalidate small ones and numerous weapons invalidate sparse weapons, but neither is actually true. The advantage bigger or more numerous weapons provide is entirely contextual, and the contexts in question are not universal.

It strikes me as very bad faith to compare a large number of well equipped and trained soldiers having a large advantage if they were to fight a smaller number of armed militiamen to a situation where the existence of large city-destroying bombs nullifies the use of individual arms. It does not contextually demonstrate the value of combined arms or tactics.

Actually...: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-type_fission_weapon

Oh so the government will make gun-style bombs but not bomb-style guns? Figures

There is a "bomb-style gun" that's been proposed (though not developed) -- a bomb-pumped laser. If you use a gun-type nuke to pump the laser, you then have a gun-bomb-gun. Presumably you could use the laser to set off a deuterium-tritium pellet, giving you a gun-bomb-gun-bomb, but that's getting ridiculous.

Thank you for this.

Can you fit a nuclear shaped charge in there somewhere, too?

Akhshually that's just the mechanism of triggering the nuclear detonation, it's still a bomb. Though directional nuclear weapons are a cool idea

To nitpick your nitpick (flea removal is nominally in my remit), doesn't the combustion of a primer and/or the main propellant charge count as a tiny bomb in a fire arm?

And if you load a far too hot handloaded .50 BMG round, well, let's say it can be a much bigger bomb.

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