Oleg Zabluda's blog: October 23, 2016

Oleg Zabluda's blog

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Ammunition Cross Sections ("""Все уже распилено до нас""")
Ammunition Cross Sections ("""Все уже распилено до нас""")
"""
5.56 PRL 87gr blended metal M948 SLAP Various 7.62x54R
M889 5.56 Incendiary Exotic Rifle Ammunition Various API+APT
Mk262 Mod1 7.62x51 M62 Brown-tip green tracer Various Incendiaries
SS109 7.62x51 Israeli CS Tear Gas Mixed Rifle
M855A1 7.62x51 M959 SLAP-T FA-T 127 Duplex 6.35mm
M200 Blank 7.62x51 Armor Piercing 7.65 Argentine Spotter
M232 Dummy 7.62x51 M198 Duplex 7.65 Argentine AP
.223 Flechette 7.62x51 Solid Copper
Various Caliber Armor Piercing
XM276 Dim Tracer 7.62x51 Hornady GMX
Various Tracers
.223 THV
Line-up of various 7.62x51 cartridges Various AP
Mk318 Mod 0 7.62x39 Steel Core 7.62x54R Russian Spotter/HE
.223 Raufoss 7.62x39 Incendiary Tracer .303 British Incediary
SS109 - ADCOM & PMC 7.62x39 Hornady Zombie Max .303 WW2 British AP
.223 APIT 7.62x39 Armor Piercing Incendiary 7.92x33 (8mm Kurz)
5.45x39 7.62x39 Chinese Tracer 8mm APIT
5.7x28 SS196SR / SS197SR 7.62x39 Czech Barrel Proof 8mm B-Patrone
Frangible Ammunition 7.63x39 Finnish Blank 7.62x39 USSR
12 gauge Flechette 7.62x39 Yugoslavian API 7.62x39 Russian
30x113mm 7.62x39 Hornady V-MAX vs. Z-MAX

Handgun Ammunition

Metal Piercing Handgun Ammunition Various Pistol - 1 Frangible Ammunition
M939 9mm Tracer Various Pistol - 2
9x19 "Sky Marshall"
.45ACP & .44mag "Shell Exploders" Various Pistol - 3
.357mag RBCD Performance Plus
Chinese 5.8x21mm .357mag Multiball 9mm Plastic Training Ammunition
.357mag National Cartridge Black Steel AP .357mag KTW 9mm German Steel Core
.357mag Winchester Black Talon 9mm Simulation Marker 7.62x25 Subsonic
.25ACP KTW 9mm Israeli Tracer 9x18 Makarov
9mm CorBon DPX
9mm Cor-Bon Pow-R-Ball
"""
http://www.ar15.com/ammo/project/Ammo_Cross_Sections/index.htm

https://vif2ne.org/nvk/forum/archive/2781/2781147.htm
http://www.ar15.com/ammo/project/Ammo_Cross_Sections/index.htm

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

"""
"""
Marine Corps' Next-Generation Logistics office quietly printed, and then detonated, an indirect fire munition [...] proved more lethal than traditionally manufactured munitions. [...] "One of the benefits of being able to precisely control the way that a munition or warhead is 'grown' through [additive manufacturing] is that we think we'll be able to tailor the blast and associated fragmentation to achieve specific effects for particular targets, heights, collateral damage, or even environmental considerations. Some of this can be done currently with very expensive, hand-made munitions, but [additive manufacturing] allows us to do it better, faster and likely cheaper."
[...]
Some 10 Marine Corps units are now equipped with 3-D printers, Wood said. Most are maintenance battalions, but several Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command units and infantry and intelligence units are also equipped with the capability, he said.
[...]
polymer part production is proving to save time and cost. Marines printed a small plastic radio crypto key for roughly $2 that would have cost more than $70 to purchase [...] One requirement: Parts must be printed in bright, non-standard colors such as yellow or green so their manufacturing origin is instantly recognizable.
[...]
When a Marine Corps MV-22B Osprey took flight in August with two mission-critical titanium parts made through additive manufacturing, the process was labor-intensive, requiring extensive testing and qualification and heat treatment for the palm-sized parts, which included an engine nacelle link and stainless steel lever for the fire extinguishing system. The printer itself cost about $900,000.
"""
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2016/09/29/marines-conducting-tests-with-3d-printed-munitions.html
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2016/09/29/marines-conducting-tests-with-3d-printed-munitions.html

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

"""
"""
1991 Persian Gulf War [...] The Army’s decision to rely on GPS was a big gamble. A fully operational GPS constellation requires 24 satellites, something the U.S. would not achieve until April 1995. In early 1991 [...] constellation included only 16 satellites, and six of those were older research and development units repurposed to help with the war effort. [...] could align long enough to provide about 19 hours each day. Accuracy would be within 16 meters, give or take, better than earlier GPS systems that had a several kilometers margin of error [...] GPS receivers were also in short supply. For starters, there were only 550 PSN-8 Manpack GPS receivers to go around. Troops fortunate enough to be issued Manpacks mounted these eight-kilogram devices—which cost $45,000 apiece—to their vehicles. A second, more portable option was the 1.8-kilogram AN/PSN-10 Small Lightweight GPS Receiver (SLGR), or “slugger.” The military had about 3,500 of the Trimble Navigation–made SLGR devices available for use in the Gulf War. “You would hear stories about Air Force, Navy and Army personnel having mom and dad send them civilian GPS receivers" [...] One of the most popular was the $3,000 NAV 1000M Receiver, which Magellan Corp. had been selling to boaters, hikers and other adventurers since the late 1980s.
[...]
helping the U.S. Army’s VII Corps and XVIII Airborne Corps initiate a [...] “left hook” [...] With only 3,000 GPS devices available for its contingent of 40,000 tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, howitzer guns and cavalry, the Army units advanced more than 200 kilometers in two days through largely uncharted desert before engaging the Iraqi Republican Guard in the decisive Battle of 73 Easting on February 26. The battle’s name provides some insight into how much the coalition relied on advanced navigational aids just to reach the enemy—“73 easting” is a north–south line on a map in the middle of the desert as opposed to a town, roadway or some other physical reference point.
"""
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gps-and-the-world-s-first-space-war/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gps-and-the-world-s-first-space-war

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

"""
"""
A little history: Reagan pushed through two major tax bills, one in 1981 that was an across-the-board tax cut of about 23 percent and one in 1986 that lowered marginal rates while hacking away at the number of deductions. Because both bills lowered the top marginal tax rate -- it went from 70 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1987 -- it sounds like these were enormous giveaways to the wealthy.

If you look at effective tax rates -- the percentage of their income that people paid, rather than the top marginal rate they paid on income above a certain level -- reality is a bit more complicated. For starters, as I said, the 1981 reform lowered rates across the board, not just at the top. Moreover, you can argue that it was actually a correction for a big problem that had developed in the 1970s known among budget wonks as "bracket creep": Basically, effective tax rates were increasing faster than real incomes, especially at the top.

Why did this happen? Inflation. We're used to the IRS publishing new tax tables every year, which, if you didn't know, is done to account for inflation. The idea is that tax rates should apply to increases in real income, not increases in the inflation rate. But this was a Reagan-era innovation. Before then, tax rates were set by law and fixed on an ad-hoc basis. The result was that receipts as a percentage of gross domestic product tended to creep upward in high-inflation periods until Congress intervened. By 1980, they had reached a postwar high of 19.1 percent of GDP, a level they did not reach again until 1998, when the dot-com boom delivered a windfall of highly inflated capital gains taxes to the Treasury. Essentially, inflation was crowding upper-middle-class people into tax brackets that had been designed for the ultra-wealthy years ago, middle-class people into rates designed for the affluent, and so on. But because the rates designed for the ultra-wealthy were really, really high, the effect was most pronounced at the top.

The changes Reagan made to the tax code lowered marginal rates and, starting in 1985, indexed them to inflation. This brought the tax take down, but by 1983, the year of peak deficits, the individual income tax was still taking in 8.2 percent of GDP, which was above the average for the 1970s. That figure does not include payroll taxes, which rose from 5.4 percent of GDP in 1979 to 6.5 percent a decade later.

During Peak Deficit, the corporate income tax yielded only 1 percent of GDP, but that was an anomaly due to the severe recession the economy was suffering. In 1978 -- the year before the oil crisis -- the corporate income tax was delivering 2.6 percent of GDP in revenue, while personal income taxes yielded 7.9 percent; in every year that followed, except for 1983, the corresponding figure for corporate income tax receipts was at least 1.4 percent of GDP. This decline in corporate income tax revenues, combined with a slight increase in personal income tax yields, cannot explain why the budget deficit had gone from 2.6 percent of GDP in 1978 to nearly 6 percent in 1983.

What does explain it? For starters, inflation fell faster than the Reagan administration had expected. Because indexing wasn't phased in until 1985, that meant the administration ended up with much lower revenues than it had expected, as Bruce Bartlett wrote in his book on Reagonomics, because there was less bracket creep. Paul Volcker's radical interest rate hikes also caused a severe recession, which lowered GDP, especially on the corporate income tax side, since corporate profits tend to be more sensitive to downturns than individual incomes. (In 2009, individual income tax receipts fell to 6.3 percent of GDP, down from 7.8 percent the year before. Corporate income tax revenues, meanwhile, declined by more than half to, yes, 1 percent of GDP. In 2007, the last healthy year for the economy, they had been 2.6 percent, about the same level as they were in 1978.) Also, Reagan was spending a lot of money. That helped.

OK, but that's deficits. What about the distribution of taxes? Wasn't there a massive shift from the wealthy to lower-income groups?

The 1981 tax reform definitely lowered income tax rates on the top, though it also lowered them on the bottom. And because the bottom pays more of its income to payroll taxes than to progressive income taxes, those people did see an effective total tax hike after 1983. By 1989, the bottom quintile had an effective total federal tax rate of 7.6 percent, compared with 7.4 percent in 1980. The quintile above them saw their total average tax rate fall to 13.5 percent from 14.1 percent. The top quintile had gone to 25 percent from 27 percent, the top 1 percent to 28 percent from 33 percent. Since the top 1 percent of the country had about 15 percent of the income, this amounts to something less than 1 percent of GDP.

Moreover, that was the tail end of a low period. In 1986, in the face of a persistent budget deficit of roughly 5 percent of GDP, the Reagan administration undertook a massive tax reform that lowered marginal rates but also got rid of most deductions, which actually ended up raising effective taxes on the highest-income groups; the total average tax rate for the top 1 percent jumped from 24.6 percent in 1986 to 30.3 percent a year later. That's why you could lower the top marginal rate to 28 percent from 70 percent and only see effective tax rates decline by five percentage points over that period.

But even that didn't last. The George H.W. Bush administration did a big budget deal that raised taxes. The Bill Clinton administration raised them again, and the effective tax rate for the top 1 percent peaked at 35.3 percent in 1995, slightly higher than it had been at the previous peak in 1979. Even after the Bush tax cuts, the effective tax rates of this top group ran somewhere slightly north of 30 percent, or about where they'd been in 1981, before Reagan's tax reform took effect. They only dipped back into the 20s under Barack Obama, because of the lasting effects of the recession.

And that doesn't tell the whole story: Meanwhile, tax rates on the bottom also fell. The average household in the bottom quintile was paying an effective 7.5 percent of their income in taxes in 1979; by 2006, that was 5.7 percent (and it dropped to basically nothing during the recession). The next quintile went to 9.9 percent from 14.5 percent by 2006; the middle to 13.9 percent from 18.9 percent; the upper-middle to 17.7 percent from 21.5 percent; and the top quintile to 25.4 percent from 27.1 percent, while the top 1 percent went to 30 percent from 35 percent. The earned income tax credit, the middle-class tax cuts that Obama made permanent in 2010, and various deduction expansions had amounted to an across-the-board tax cut for everyone, not just the wealthy.

In other words, while there was a short period during which tax rates dropped a lot on the very top and rose slightly on the bottom, that period ended in 1986. Then taxes started increasing, mostly on the highest incomes, until they came close again to their bracket-creep-driven 1979 peak.
"""
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-04-14/the-reagan-tax-debate-is-a-distraction
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-04-14/the-reagan-tax-debate-is-a-distraction

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

About Me