From: Ryan Lackey <rdl@mit.edu>
Date: Sun, 4 Jan 1998 05:17:54 +0800
To: "Brian B. Riley" <brianbr@together.net>
Subject: Re: Guns: H&K, G3, 7.62 v 5.56 [Guns] (fwd)
Message-ID: <tw77m8hi7zs.fsf@the-great-machine.mit.edu>
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I've only seen bolt action .50s fired.  They're not *too* heavy, and
from the amount of muzzle flash, noise, etc. it gave, I'd be as comfortable
using it at 1000-1500 yards as I would a .308 at 600-1000 yards.  Given
proper concealment and the absence of anyone looking directly at you
when you fire, that is.  Professional sniping is a 2 man operation anyway --
against a target that can shoot back, you really want to have a spotter.

>From what I can gather, the US military seems to agree with this
strategy -- .308s for traditional sniping, .50 for anti-materiel, extreme
long range, and countersniping.  Attacking an incoming force which has
its own snipers is mostly a job for the .50.  And if I were in the field
on the offense, I'd be attacking small enough groups that a few .50
rounds would be sufficient to kill them all or at least immobilize them.
Or high enough value targets to make a more likely kill worth the higher
risk during E&E.  True, they mainly use bolt-action .50s -- if the semi
auto version is really that much heavier, I'd probably go for the bolt
action gun in the field and the semi at my home.

For Tim May's situation, in a house, they know fairly well that he's firing
from the house.  Pretty much any weapon will give enough signature for them to
zero in on it and fire.  If he's lucky, and they just have carbines and
7.62 snipers, he could fire from one room, move to another, fire, etc.  Or have
enough cover to keep himself from getting hit.  But at some point, they'll
just bring in a real countersniper asset, like an automatic cannon, and
any muzzle flash will be responded to with several hundred AP/explosive shells.
Within the house, the weight of a .50 isn't that bad -- and the extra 500-1000
yards and AP capability might make a difference against a raid.  At the very
least, it'll get his place firebombed rather than shot up :)  Forcing
them to keep outside the 1500-2000 yard high danger range from a .50 (or
forcing them to stay behind serious cover) would give him a chance to duck
out and fight another day, too :)  A .50 is also a bit more effective
against helicopters containing special forces "monitoring" personnel
who are there (but of course not actually there) in violation of the law.

It would be interesting to fit one's house with speakers/noise generators/
flash generators/smoke/etc. to make it look as if one has an automatic
cannon or a small army, in response to a raid.  It would make a perfect
distraction during which to leave :)


I'd much rather write code, make money, and leave the country (not
necessarily in that order) than worry about defending myself from a
government which has shown time and time again it is willing to ignore
the law, though.

[ObCrypto:
* Eternity DDS is coming along.  The current almost-ready-for-announcement
version is using Postgres95 for a backend, sigh.  Design for the
first production-demo system is progressing as well.

* The Cypherpunks Archive project I was working on is also progressing.
Unfortunately, my archive is kind of weird -- it's in MIT discuss
format, and converting it into mbox is nontrivial, given the size of the
file.  After adding more memory to the system on which I'm editing the
file, I think I have an mbox file which is just missing one field.  I'm
planning to index them with hypermail, then glimpse.  On the cd, I'll
put the original mbox file, either as a single massive file or broken up,
depending on what people want, as well as a precomputed index and perhaps
the web site version as well.  The next step is to put all of the cypherpunks
archives into Eternity DDS -- Postgres95 seems to puke on large data objects
sometimes, so I'll need to fix that.

Once I get the cypherpunks archive done, I'll work on some other lists.  And
then hopefully some people will buy CD-Rs so I can buy another 25gb of HDD
or so :)

* Financial people are pretty cool.  I just got back from talking to some
about the Eternity Service concept, and they were really excited.  I really
didn't expect non-(electronic finance) finance people to be interested in it 
right away.  They even got more excited when the magic word "cryptography"
was mentioned.  Perhaps finance will fix the software industry.
-- 
Ryan Lackey
rdl@mit.edu
http://mit.edu/rdl/