That was fun and informative. Thanks, neighbor – I owe you a tasty slice of Corky’s pizza!
For the GAU-8 and the HSh-6-30 I don’t think they are self-powered so the calculated weight to thrust wouldn’t be accurate.
Though a bigger oversight is that the bullets are useless dead weight. You would get more thrust with less weight just by shooting the cartridges with no bullets. In fact really you’d want to take the entire magazine holding the bullets and reconfigure it to just contain powder, with a suitably designed exhaust nozzle. IOW, strip out most of the weight of the gun and turn it into a solid propellant rocket.
Not sure I follow - the thrust is from the mass of matter ejected (x velocity) whether bullets, gas, or cartridge fragments.
All of the kinetic energy comes from the propellant. If that propellant is applying the kinetic energy to the bullet or cartridge fragments, then you either gain nothing or else it is actually less efficient. You’d do better to either not carry the dead weight of the bullets to begin with, or even better substitute their weight in propellent for more energy.
True.
For the GAU-8 (and M61 Vulcan) the aircraft hydraulic system powers hydromotors that rotate the barrels and operate the ammo drum and cartridge feed mechanisms. The breechblock cycling is a mechanical cam system as part of the rotation of the breech assembly. The round actually firing is triggered electrically from the aircraft electrical system; there is no mechanical firing pin.
I can’t speak authoritatively to the HSh-6-30, but I’d expect it’s similar. Whether electrical or hydraulic, there’s a bunch of horsepower being injected into the system from someplace external.
“Do YOU remember the skylight being this big?”
Okay, I really like this one!
I’ve hired contractors like that.
The worst was when they laid sod in the walk-out basement. Took months to get the manure smell out of the house. 
The inside vs outside distinction is so arbitrary.
walk-out basement = walk-in yard
Thank goodness they weren’t digging their own water well.
The hardest part about digging upwards is shoring up the hole so it doesn’t immediately refill with air.
My brother threw a “lawn party” in college, where he and his roommates bought sod, and covered the floor of their dorm living room.
“‘The zero line in WMM2025 passes through a lot of population centers; I wonder what year the largest share of the population lived in a zone of less than 5° of declination,’ he thought, derailing all other tasks for the rest of the day.”
The agonic line used to pass through Wisconsin, and is now goes through the MSP metro, which means (assuming it is continuous) it passed through my house.
Brian
(The lines are updated every 5 years on aeronautical charts)
OK, I’ll admit it. I don’t understand this one at all. I’m usually really good with maps, and inferring the humor in a comic, even when I don’t understand the specifics of the underlying science. But I’ve got nothing here.
Can someone help?
All flat map projections include distortions. Many map projections are cylindrical (because that results in a rectangular map, and we like rectangles), and on a cylindrical projection, the distortion is greatest for points near the poles. But the poles are, in some sense, arbitrary points on the Earth’s surface: They’re relevant for rotation, but why should rotation be the basis for how we set up maps? So this projection, instead of using the rotational poles, uses the magnetic poles. Since the magnetic poles are different from the rotational poles, this map is distorted in different ways than a familiar projection. But since the magnetic poles are close to the rotational poles, it doesn’t look too different.
I certainly get the “derailed for the rest of the day” outcome. How many times have we all been derailed when an idle thoght suddenly blooms into a short-lived obsession?
So, that’s what i thought the map was. But i guess i don’t get why it’s an especially bad projection.
I also didn’t know what WMM2025 is.
From a quick Google, it’s the current standard model describing the magnetic field of the Earth. The actual total magnetic field is ludicrously complex, since it’s affected by every piece of iron everywhere, on every scale: Move your refrigerator (or your car), and the magnetic field of the Earth changes. We can’t model the field to that level of detail, so we make models that can model it to a more realistic level of detail.