One of the guns I will be sure to check out at SHOT this week is PTR’s new 9KT.
Featuring an M-Lok handguard with attached finger guard, the 9KT uses a 5.16-inch, three-lug barrel threaded in 1/2x28TPI for your favorite muzzle device or suppressor. The gun will be offered with the same push-button or paddle-style mag release as in their current 9C/CT guns as well as a top rail for optics. The end cap has a QD sling mount and stock adapter (NFA rules apply).
As such it is set up to be a direct competitor to the nearly $3K HK SP5K.
Always something captivating about a night transit of a place like this while “haze gray and underway.” Just keep your eyes out.
Official caption: “The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Donald Cook (DDG 75) transits the Bosphorus Strait, en route to the Black Sea, Jan. 19, 2019. Donald Cook, forward-deployed to Rota, Spain, is on its eighth patrol in the U.S. 6th Fleet area of operations in support of U.S. national security interests in Europe and Africa.”
(U.S. Navy photos by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Ford Williams/Released)
Perhaps best known for his epic portrayal of Battery Sergeant Major Williams in the Perry & Croft (they also did Dad’s Army and Allo’ Allo!) WWII sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, the British actor Windsor Davies has passed at age 88.
Davies, who served in the East Surrey Regiment in the 1950s in Egypt on the lead-up to the Suez Crisis, captured a CSM brilliantly, some would say. Perry & Croft would know, as they served themselves, in India, where It Ain’t Half Hot Mum was set.
For sci-fi nerds, he also appeared in B&W Doctor Who episodes (with the Second Doctor) and voiced Sergeant Major Zero in the Terrahawks.
You can bet that caricatures of Williams/Davies will endure forever.
Happy 45th birthday to the F-16 Fighting Falcon, which made its first official flight on this day in 1974.
The first flight of YF-16 was an unintentional takeoff at Edwards AFB in January 1974. Phil Oestricher was the test pilot. Photo Via Gen Dyn.
Now, with over 4,500 Vipers delivered to more than 26 countries, the F-16 is still in production, with F16V and Block 70 F-16s on the drawing board. Odds are, there will be at least some of the birds flying somewhere on active duty in 2074 when the type turns 100.
Of course, the same can probably be said of F15s and F-18s, which came from the same period.
“The Ballad of the infantry” is a 2-minute recruiting video/saga that was produced in 2016 and talks about service of the Ukrainian soldier told in part around his love of the traditional entrenching tool used by the 135,000-man force.
The Russian E-tool design dates back to the time of the Tsars and is still in use both by the Russian army as well as many that formerly belonged to the Soviet Union.
Red Army GRU officer Vladimir Rezun, who defected and wrote a series of slightly over-the-top books under the pen name of Viktor Suvorov in the 1980s and 90s, spoke at length about the use of such stubby one-man E-tools, and it almost feels as if he wrote the storyboard for the above video.
From Icebreaker:
The ordinary foot soldier, armed with his rifle and shovel, can dig a trench to make it difficult and sometimes impossible for the enemy to cross the Line. If you put the same soldier, armed with his rifle or even a light machine gun, not into a mud-hole in the middle of a field, but into even the most simple dismantled , then his tenacity and firmness will increase tenfold. He will have at least one metre of reinforced ferro-concrete over his head, a metre and a half of it in front of him and a metre on each side, all carefully camouflaged from the enquiring gaze of the enemy. If 170 first-echelon Soviet divisions were put into these albeit dismantled boxes, it would have been no simple matter to break through their defences. Defending troops always need something to hold on to: the dismantled forts at Verdun; the bastions at Brest- Litovsk; the walls at Stalingrad; or the trenches in the Kursk salient, which had been abandoned two years previously. Once they have such a foothold, the infantry will dig in in such a way that nothing will smoke them out of their lairs and burrows.
From Spetsnaz: The Inside Story of the Soviet Special Forces:
Every infantryman in the Soviet Army carries with him a small spade. When he is given the order to halt he immediately lies flat and starts to dig a hole in the ground beside him. In three minutes he will have dug a little trench 15 centimetres deep, in which he can lie stretched out flat, so that bullets can whistle harmlessly over his head. The earth he has dug out forms a breastwork in front and at the side to act as an additional cover. If a tank drives over such a trench the soldier has a 50% chance that it will do him no harm. At any moment the soldier may be ordered to advance again and, shouting at the top of his voice, will rush ahead. If he is not ordered to advance, he digs in deeper and deeper. At first his trench can be used for firing in the lying position. Later it becomes a trench from which to fire in the kneeling position, and later still, when it is 110 centimetres deep, it can be used for firing in the standing position. The earth that has been dug out protects the soldier from bullets and fragments. He makes an embrasure in this breastwork into which he positions the barrel of his gun. In the absence of any further commands he continues to work on his trench. He camouflages it. He starts to dig a trench to connect with his comrades to the left of him. He always digs from right to left, and in a few hours the unit has a trench linking all the riflemen’s trenches together. The unit’s trenches are linked with the trenches of other units. Dug-outs are built and communication trenches are added at the rear. The trenches are made deeper, covered over, camouflaged and reinforced. Then, suddenly, the order to advance comes again. The soldier emerges, shouting and swearing as loudly as he can.
The infantryman uses the same spade for digging graves for his fallen comrades. If he doesn’t have an axe to hand he uses the spade to chop his bread when it is frozen hard as granite. He uses it as a paddle as he floats across wide rivers on a telegraph pole under enemy fire. And when he gets the order to halt, he again builds his impregnable fortress around himself. He knows how to dig the earth efficiently. He builds his fortress exactly as it should be. The spade is not just an instrument for digging: it can also be used for measuring. It is 50 centimetres long. Two spade lengths are a metre. The blade is 15 centimetres wide and 18 centimetres long. With these measurements in mind the soldier can measure anything he wishes.
The infantry spade does not have a folding handle, and this is a very important feature. It has to be a single monolithic object. All three of its edges are as sharp as a knife. It is painted with a green matt paint so as not to reflect the strong sunlight.
The spade is not only a tool and a measure. It is also a guarantee of the steadfastness of the infantry in the most difficult situations. If the infantry have a few hours to dig themselves in, it could take years to get them out of their holes and trenches, whatever modern weapons are used against them.
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Surprisingly, the spetsnaz soldiers also carry the little infantry spades. Why do they need them? It is practically impossible to describe in words how they use their spades. You really have to see what they do with them. In the hands of a spetsnaz soldier the spade is a terrible noiseless weapon and every member of spetsnaz gets much more training in the use of his spade then does the infantryman. The first thing he has to teach himself is precision: to split little slivers of wood with the edge of the spade or to cut off the neck of a bottle so that the bottle remains whole. He has to learn to love his spade and have faith in its accuracy. To do that he places his hand on the stump of a tree with the fingers spread out and takes a big swing at the stump with his right hand using the edge of the spade. Once he has learnt to use the spade well and truly as an axe he is taught more complicated things. The little spade can be used in hand-to-hand fighting against blows from a bayonet, a knife, a fist or another spade. A soldier armed with nothing but the spade is shut in a room without windows along with a mad dog, which makes for an interesting contest. Finally a soldier is taught to throw the spade as accurately as he would use a sword or a battle-axe. It is a wonderful weapon for throwing, a single, well-balanced object, whose 32-centimetre handle acts as a lever for throwing. As it spins in flight it gives the spade accuracy and thrust. It becomes a terrifying weapon. If it lands in a tree it is not so easy to pull out again. Far more serious is it if it hits someone’s skull, although spetsnaz members usually do not aim at the enemy’s face but at his back. He will rarely see the blade coming, before it lands in the back of his neck or between his shoulder blades, smashing the bones.
The spetsnaz soldier loves his spade. He has more faith in its reliability and accuracy than he has in his Kalashnikov automatic. An interesting psychological detail has been observed in the kind of hand-to-hand confrontations which are the stock in trade of spetsnaz. If a soldier fires at an enemy armed with an automatic, the enemy also shoots at him. But if he doesn’t fire at the enemy but throws a spade at him instead, the enemy simply drops his gun and jumps to one side.
Anyway, the moral of the story is to watch out for guys East of Prague who carry stubby spades and know how to use them.
The gestation period of a Beretta M9 frame is covered in one place and with the help of 18 different receivers to show the work. The M-9 receiver production sequence is explained in 3D with actual frames in various stages of completion in an upcoming auction from Rock Island, ranging from a blank forging to a finished serialized receiver.
Click to big up
Starting with a 7075-T6 aluminum forging that weighs 27.7-ounces, the 65×49-inch board covers the 15 workstations and 42 machines used to cut the forging down to a 6.98-ounce completed receiver that has had 75 percent of the original material removed. Each of the stations is detailed (e.g. “Work Station #10: Mill trigger bar seat, disassembly button, right side & trigger guard area”) with the changes done to the frame highlighted in red.
Not a lot of background as to how the board was used, other than it originated with Beretta USA. The U.S. subsidiary was founded in 1972 and headquartered in Accokeek, Maryland but in recent years has moved a lot of their production to a new facility in Gallatin, Tennessee.
While the U.S. Navy ordered a class of 8 heavily-armed polar icebreakers in WWII (the Wind-class, which carried twin 5″/38 DP mounts, 40mm Bofors, 20mm Oerlikons, depth charges, seaplanes and an ASW mortar), as well as the larger single-vessel USS Glacier (AGB-4) by 1955, just a decade later the Navy left the ice biz to the realm of the sparsely-funded Coast Guard.
Since then, all nine of these breakers have been sent to the scrapper, replaced in the 1970s by just two (relatively unarmed) Polar-class icebreakers of which only one was still operational by 2010.
Now 43-years young, the country’s sole polar icebreaker, USCGC Polar Star (WAGB-10), just reached Antarctica on her annual Operation Deep Freeze resupply mission to McMurdo Station– while her crew went unpaid due to the current lapse in funding.
The voyage wasn’t pretty.
U.S. Coast Guard scuba divers work to repair a leak in the shaft seal of the Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star
From the Coast Guard:
During this year’s deployment, one of the ship’s electrical systems began to smoke, causing damage to wiring in an electrical switchboard, and one of the ship’s two evaporators used to make drinkable water failed.
The ship also experienced a leak from the shaft that drives the ship’s propeller, which halted icebreaking operations in order to send scuba divers in the water to repair the seal around the shaft. A hyperbaric chamber on loan from the U.S. Navy aboard the ship allows Coast Guard divers to make external emergency repairs and inspections of the ship’s hull.
The Polar Star also experienced ship-wide power outages while breaking ice. Crew members spent nine hours shutting down the ship’s power plant and rebooting the electrical system in order to remedy the outages.
If a catastrophic event, such as getting stuck in the ice, were to happen to the Healy in the Arctic or to the Polar Star near Antarctica, the U.S. Coast Guard is left without a self-rescue capability.
Yikes.
Can you imagine being a young Coastie E-4 on that ship right now?
In Antarctica?
While your old lady (or man) sends you emails that the light bill is due and check on the 15th was for $0.00?
Politics aside, be sure, if you are able, to contribute to your local efforts to take care of USCG families in your area, and keep those deployed in your thoughts.
When we see photos of submarine interiors from the WWII-era, there is a general monochrome aspect to them due to the B&W nature and washed out “copy of a copy” life span of such imagery.
Submarine officer sights through a periscope in the submarine’s control room, during training exercises at the Submarine Base, New London, Groton, Connecticut, in August 1943 80-G-K-16013
Well, the USS Cod Submarine Memorial has done the research and determined that the inside of a sub actually had a lot of colors, and are acting accordingly by painting their electrical control boxes gloss black, lockers gray, flashlight bins flat orange, and torpedo pyrotechnic casks red.
It seems that most of the remaining vessels passed into museum status after years as USNRF trainers in the 1950s and 60s, during which the old, “If it moves: salute it. If it doesn’t move: pick it up. If you can’t pick it up: paint it,” mantra came into play during drills and the only paint available was haze gray– so everything got a coat or seven.
Tank Museum Curator David Willey at the Bovington Tank Museum covers the Cold War classic, the good old Kampfpanzer Leopard I, which, in my opinion, in 1964 when they were introduced, were the king of the hill when it came to MBTs.
Ultimately, they were used by not only West Germany but also Australia, Belgium, Britain (the Hippo BARV), Canada, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, and Norway while the tank, which has been out of production since 1984, is still serving with Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Greece, and Turkey.
Crafted by Carl Walther Waffenfabrik + the gang back in the Weimar Republic of the late 1920s and pitched as a police gun, the Polizeipistole (PP) was beautiful for its time soon edged out its contemporaries to a degree. By 1929, a shorter and more compact model, designed specifically as a concealable detective’s carry piece, Polizeipistole Kriminalmodell (PPK), hit the market and hasn’t looked back.
Fueled by Bond films and a hungry import market in the U.S. for the gun after WWII, the rebooted Carl Walther GmbH shipped the PPK by the boatload to the States until 1968 when the Gun Control Act lowered the boom on the design.
Walther ad from 1955, note the prices
Tweaked to meet the “point” system to make it qualify for “sporting purposes,” the PPK/s model took over as Interarms/Ranger/EMCO built the standard PPK under license from Walther in Alabama starting in the 1980s.
Eventually, this all changed as S&W replaced EMCO and made the guns for Walther starting in 1998, a relationship that ended around 2012-ish.
Now, after a hiatus, both the PPK and PPK/s are being made here in the U.S. again, this time in-house in Walther’s plant in Arkansas.
The PPK and PPK/s compared, with the latter being a skosh larger and with a 7+1 capacity of .380 rather than the standard 6+1 of the PPK
They are set to hit the market this month, priced around $700~ which is about 3x as much as a polymer-framed LCP with the same capacity, but Bond didn’t carry an LCP.
