Be Excellent To Each Other

Thought this deserved its own thread:
#ixzz0mtlCW3jo">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z0mtlCW3jo

There is no doubt this is an impressive feat. However, is it just me who thinks the revelry the article portrays is frankly a little sickening.

*wipes tear from eye*

Rule Britannia!

*weeps*

Yeah I see what you mean Bobby.

Bit of an ACHEEZO UNLOCKED! treatment.

I was quickly distracted by this however:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ar ... -film.html

I trust that a Guinness Book of Records officiator has been sent out to authenticate the claim?

Also, I see that in the comments that 'Why celebrate the killing of human life......?' has been down-voted 488 times and 'Since when was killing something to be celebrated.?' 819 times.

Like some of the commenters on that, I'm a bit surprised that they published his personal details. I wouldn't be surprised if he got some crazy letters from nutters after that.

Camper.

LOL AWP WHORE!1!1!!

OoooOOoooo, Bobby said he thought this deserved it's own thread lovey. Hello Sailor!

Fucking shot, though.

ft?

wtf.

Only 5 rounds in the magazine seems pretty low.

Should have used his noob tube, tbf.

I'm trying to work out how far a bullet would drop in that amount of flight time, but my brain isn't working and online calculators are all full of complicated stuff I don't understand. The guy must have aimed about 50yds above their heads to be able to hit them properly.

I bet he had his lag switch on max.

The gun sights can compensate for that, though. Wind would be the tricky one.

I was watching QI at the weekend and I found it interesting that a bullet fired 'straight' from a gun falls at the same speed as one dropped at the same hight from your hand... just the other moves a bit faster forward.

Guess he's be aiming very high as per Squirt's comments.

If you're interested enough to remind me on Friday I'll try to find out for you. I'm away visiting a pal, who happens to be a sniper (although I think it's the spotter that does most of the calculations).

It'll depend on his mood though, he's going for his third holiday to Afghan in a few months & has a wean on the way

The gun sights can compensate for that, though. They'll measure the distance to the target, then tell you to adjust upward by x amount.

Do the taliban have a record for most people killed with an IED or car bomb?

If he was firing straight and the bullet just dropped it would be about 34 or so metres below where he fired from.

Of course, it's extremely unlikely that was the case, so teh muzzle velocity and trajectory will come into play, but even I'm not bored enough to calculate it.

Computers were invented for gunnery table reasons.

That thing where those terrorists crashed the planes into the World Trade Center... that was awesome! Greatest military action ever!

They killed loads for the price of some plane tickets and some stanley knives! They also brought their enemies ecomomy to its knees. Much better than silly sniper bloke.

I read in another article that he had to aim a few feet above their heads and slightly to the left or something. It was a very calm day wind-wise. The bullet got there in just over two seconds.

And their bullet flew MILES before it landed!

s = 0.5*a* t^2

where a is the acceleration - is this case gravity (9.81 m/s^2)
& t is the time taken - 3 seconds.
s is the displacement - the amount the bullet falls - and comes out to be 44m.

Now, that assumes that bullets don''t produce aerodynamic lift and it wasn't fired in an arc. So is an upper limit.

Not sure it is though. The guns operating range is just a measure of when the accuracy of the gun (rather than the operator) is much larger than the size of a human.

I suspect this is no more impressive than having lots of people shoot people very far away during the years of our questionable wars and then putting the occasional lucky shot down to skill (because it makes a great story to daily mail idiots) rather than just many rolls of the dice.

Wifes brother is an Army officer, and the whole family has forces connections. However, until her brother, only her granddad had seen action before her brother went to Afghanistan a couple of years back.

Soon after he came back from his first tour, he came over to ours and there was an Army Recruitment advert on TV. I mentioned in passing that with the recent combat experience of many troops, it remains interesting that recruitment ads rarely recognise a weapon being fired in anger - his reaction was not surprised, indeed, even people going out on tour on the back of training still don't necessarily have the two aspects linked in their head.

Don't know what point this is trying to make, maybe that being surprised that soldiers, like, kill people, shouldn't come as a surprise.

In fairness, he hit the second guy too...

Doesn't necessarily mean anything though.

His shot was dead on. Which is impressive. But at that range the vast majority of shots would miss. Because of the gun.

I'm not trying to belittle the shot, i just find it interesting when a small % chance of success (that is independent of ability) coupled with many attempts is interpreted as personal skill rather than statistics when flukes happen.

It's kinda like saying: "Britain's sniper brigade one the lottery this week, and it only took all 14 million to buy a ticket each."

The gun has an effective range of less than one mile. It was vehicle mounted, so he'd have had to hold it still, and aim it himself. It would probably have calculated the distance and suggested the elevation needed, and obviously the lack of wind was important, but the scope wouldn't be designed to sight to that distance* - why would it ever need to? So the people he was looking at wouldn't be that big in his scope. Lucky that it came off (twice) or not - it was still a fucking good shot.

*25x max, apparently

I'd like to note, however, that I don't agree with the tone of the story. "Whoo, look at us kill!" isn't the sort of thing I agree with.

Is killing Talebans bad then? If not, it's a good thing, right? And good things should be celebrated. After all, every dead Talebans is making us safer here!

[to the tune of that song about bananas]

Hey Mr Taleban,
Tally me jihadis.
Daylight come,
And me sniper fuck you up.

Yup. if they're over here waving guns in people's faces then fair enough. Until they set foot on our soil though, I put them firmly in the "not our problem" camp.

Preemptive Telaban-icide is bad? So our boys are wasting their lives? I'm telling the Daily Mail on you.

Seriously, dude, much as I'm against our current aimless twatting about over there, we should certainly be overseas popping caps in asses of people who might hurt us. Preferably whilst watched on preposterously high definition spy satellite feed by James Earl Jones.

I didn't ask my friend about his trips abroad with the Marines. It doesn't seem to be the polite thing to do. Read about them, though, in the news and that.

And with that, we can do anything.

Frankly, we shouldn't need even that. We used to own most of this fucking globe, and now we're thinking twice before killing locals? For shame, sir.

s'called progress.

You, sir, are no patriot.

Minor Me Versions 1 and 2 both like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I also quite enjoy it, as it's daft and funny and has some awesomely catchy songs, nice cars, trains and a pretty lady (what more is there in life?). However, I recently noticed a line from that chap who died a few weeks ago about something along the lines of "my brigadier's uniform was so shiny the fuzzy wuzzies were too blinded to even fight". Frankly, after twigging to that, I may be boycotting James Bond.

Shame that. Fuzzy Wuzzy is possibly my favourite Kipling poem.

One of the Famous Five books describes one of the characters, upon coming our of a coal mine, as being "black as a nigger with soot". They're editing that out of the current edition, which I think is fair enough.
What I don't think is fair enough is the fact that they're re-writing parts of it to make it less sexist

I've got a pristine paperback copy of Ten Little Niggers by Agatha Christie which I "inherited" when my father died and my mother said "help yourself" to my dad's books.

Why? If editing for racism is okay, why not for the pretty fucking huge sexism which is just as inherent in blyton's clumsy, shitty writing as the racism? It's all of its time, so why is one okay to edit out and not the other?

I'd have left it *all* as it is, to be honest - it was a different time, and it's pretty obvious to the reader that it was written by a ghastly, racist, child hating witch who fucked over her husband so hard she almost tripped.

Personally I deplore the re-writing of history to suit modern values. It's not that I agree with what was commonly acceptable back then (if indeed it was), but that if we can't look such things in the eye and see how we've progressed, and how much better we are for it, then we never will progress as a society. I also question if, when we apply modern values to the past, we aren't actually misunderstanding the past; Fuzzy Wuzzy, for example, is actually about respect rather than racism.

I've only looked at the url, but that was entertaining enough. [ut_announcer_voice]DOUBLE TALIBAN KILL![/ut_announcer_voice]

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a woman?

Leave the books as they are. If there's racism in them, tough shit. That's how it was written, and it can stand on fall on those merits.

ie: let it fall. Fuck Enid Blyton. She's had a long enough run. It's not like there's a shortage of good books for children around. If the stories are good enough to withstand people reading them and going "ah, well, that's a gollywog. You see, back then..."*, then good. If not, no great loss.

*As happened in a couple of books we had when we were kids. I think one was by Blyton as it happens, too. And hey! I'm pretty sure I grasped the concept that racism can fuck off regardless.

You should all see me at Silent Scope. I can get to level two and everything.

Quite. And the quite seemingly forgotten idea of respect for one's opponents.



Much of Kipling is an incredibly worthwhile read for a perspective on the British attitude to war and colonialism.

Because there's a difference between changing the word "nigger" to "rook" and changing whole characters and storylines.