#4247432 - 04/07/16 12:45 PM
What are you reading in April
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 20,152
Top Gun
Lifer
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Lifer
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 20,152
Roch-Vegas NH
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Just finishing up Stephen Coonts The Art of War, it was a good read. http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-War-Grafton-Novels/dp/1250041996 Purchased Modern American Snipers which I'll start tonight. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=modern+American+Snipers
XboxLive Tag: DOBrienTG1969 Dave O'Brien,Top Gun PhotographyNikon D500 & D7200 Nikkor 70-200VR AF-s F/2.8 Sigma 50-500 & 17-50 F2.8 Sigma 150-600
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#4247805 - 04/08/16 02:14 AM
Re: What are you reading in April
[Re: Top Gun]
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Joined: May 2000
Posts: 9,710
Legend
Legsie is such a
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Legsie is such a
Hotshot
Joined: May 2000
Posts: 9,710
Zutphen, NL / ShangHai, China
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Reading Ken Follet's " The pillars of the earth". I've read it in the past, but that's more than 25 years ago by now.
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
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#4248272 - 04/09/16 09:12 AM
Re: What are you reading in April
[Re: Top Gun]
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Joined: May 2006
Posts: 3,743
HeinKill
Senior Member
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Senior Member
Joined: May 2006
Posts: 3,743
Cloud based
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Post-human, David Simpson, omnibus of 4 novellas. Just finishing book 4. He's a prolific author, all his books highly rated. The first in the series grabbed me with a premise of gene and nanobot modified humans vs anti tech humans. But he threw in a nuclear war as though it was just a conventional conflict that killed a billion people, and lost me. The plot went from tech vs non tech to tech vs tech in a been there done that plot of future tech arms race and it got kinda boring...not sure who was the good guys and bad guys and stopped caring. Huge unlikely events were dealt with superficially (Venus terraformed, in a week!) Last book was a prequel, which kind of threw me because I didnt even realise that until 97 pc finished. All up mildly interesting but not satisfying. http://www.amazon.com/Post-Human-Omnibus-1-4-David-Simpson-ebook/dp/B00H0D5NTI/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
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#4248587 - 04/10/16 09:05 PM
Re: What are you reading in April
[Re: Top Gun]
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Joined: Nov 2005
Posts: 3,066
RedToo
Senior Member
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Senior Member
Joined: Nov 2005
Posts: 3,066
Bolton UK
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Just started this: A review in the Sunday Times caught my attention. Time for a little learning! From Amazon: Peter, Matthew, Thomas, John :Who were these men and what was their relationship to Jesus? Tom Bissell gives us rich and deeply informed answers to those ancient questions. Written with warmth, humour, and a rare acumen, Apostle is a brilliant and exhaustive synthesis of travel writing, centuries of biblical history, and a deep lifelong relationship with Christianity. Bissell explores not just who these renowned and pious men were (and weren't), but how their identities have taken shape over two millennia. Bissell, in his search for this elusive set of truths, has traveled the world, visiting holy sites from Rome and Jerusalem to Turkey, India, and Kyrgyzstan, and he captures vividly the rich diversity of Christianity's global reach. Apostle is an unusual, erudite, and hilarious book, an intoxicating combination of religious, intellectual, and personal adventure. RedToo.
My 'Waiting for Clod' thread: http://tinyurl.com/bqxc9eeAlways take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.Elie Wiesel. Romanian born Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, Holocaust survivor. 1928 - 2016. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. C.S. Lewis, 1898 - 1963.
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#4248748 - 04/11/16 02:39 PM
Re: What are you reading in April
[Re: PanzerMeyer]
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Joined: Mar 2003
Posts: 6,870
Wireman
Lurker Extraordinaire
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Lurker Extraordinaire
Hotshot
Joined: Mar 2003
Posts: 6,870
The First State, USA
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This has me thinking about the ACW films made by Hollywood and whether or not the rifles and revolvers used in those films were the historically accurate ones (replicas of course). First page of Chapter 4: CHAPTER 4
The Rifle, The Primer, The Ball
The rifle was the major tactical weapon of the war. Rifles were issued to armies both North and South. These were mainly new weapons, of novel pattern. Basic to both fighting forces were Springfield rifles Models 1855 and 1861, and the British 1853-56 En- fields bought by the hundred thousands from abroad. Despite the scarcity of many goods in the South as the conflict dragged on, rifles were usually in ample supply. But the significant thing was that the rifle, as a weapon of war, was brand new. A rifle could fire a bullet with man-killing accuracy over 800 yards, much farther than the effective range of the smoothbore muskets which had been supplanted by rifles in the infantry for only a half dozen years. And the battles of the War were fought with tactics adapted to musketry engagements. The slaughter created by this mixing of old and new patterns of fighting was terrible, and resulted in making the American Civil War the bloodiest conflict of modern times.
Rifle Effect at Fredericksburg
In Burnside's assault on the high ground south of Fredericksburg, Union troops with fixed bayonets charged a fortified position occupied by 6,000 Confederate troops and 20 guns. Many of these were riflemen. While some troops, notably Meagher's brigade, reached the stone wall at the base of the hill, they were cut to pieces on the way. Meanwhile their supporting columns had become exposed to the longer range canister and case fire of Confederate artillery batteries. The whirling balls delivered in a cannon burst at a thousand yards cut the troops down. Joe Hooker was ordered by Burnside to renew the assault. Hooker's report claimed "the fire of the enemy now became still hotter. The stone wall was a sheet of flame that enveloped the head of the column. Officers and men fell so rapidly that orders could not be passed." Officers with flashing sabers (cost $20, deducted from the officer's pay) and enlisted men with rifles and bayonets fixed (stand complete, $20) charged at the run, as their ancestors had done a century before in Europe, offering to cool marksmen targets two feet wide and five feet high. Only sheer weight of numbers allowed part of the Union lines to reach the emplaced Confederates, and the assault failed. Fredericksburg rated as one of the greatest slaughters of the war.
Rifle Capabilities Already Known
Yet the awful capabilities of the rifle were not unknown to men on both sides. The papers enjoyed publishing incidents of marksmanship matches. The Baltimore Sun in March, 1856 recounted an anecdote of the War of 1812. Colonel William Stansbury's First Rifle Regiment "amused themselves in shooting, Captain Ezekiel Burke frequently cutting off small bird's heads, and in a match with a great shot from Kentucky, for $100 at sixty yards off-hand. Burke won, putting three balls in the same hole so that until they were cut out of the tree all thought his last two shots had missed the mark." Unfortunately, wide issue of rifles was not at that time accompanied by any scientific study of the change in field tactics they dictated. Rifle shooting was popular in some areas of the country. German settlers in the Ohio Valleymen who later were to make up a large part of Franz Sigel's beer-drinking soldierswere expert riflemen. At a meeting of an Ohio rifle club just before the Civil War, 30 men put 10 shots each inside a 10-inch circle at 300 yards. It is also recorded that at a distance of three- fourths of a mile, many shots had been put inside a flour barrel without a miss.
Examples of Effect of Rifle Fire During the Civil War
There were plenty of individual opportunities for combatants to learn the range of rifle fire. "From a distance of nearly half a mile the Rebel sharpshooters drew a bead on us with a precision which deserved the highest commendation of their officers, but which made us curse the day they were born," wrote William Henry De Forest in A Volunteer's Adventures. "One incident proves, I think," he continued, "that they were able to hit an object further off than they could distinguish its nature. A rubber blanket, hung over the stump of a sapling five feet high, which stood in the center of our bivouac, was pierced by a bullet from this quarter. A minute later a second bullet passed directly over the object and lodged in a tree behind it. I ordered the blanket to be taken down, and It's a good read; blends history, technical data, and personal observations together.
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#4251387 - 04/21/16 11:04 AM
Re: What are you reading in April
[Re: Top Gun]
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Joined: Oct 2008
Posts: 3,340
Lieste
Senior Member
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Senior Member
Joined: Oct 2008
Posts: 3,340
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Juat my class textbook: A Thorough Description of the Free Knightly and Noble Art of Combat with All Customary Weapons, Adorned and Presented with Many Fine and Useful Illustration By Joachim Meyer, freifechter of Strassburg 1570 Translated text: The Art of Combat, Joachim Meyer, Dr Jeffrey Forung (ed), Frontline Books 2015. ISBN: 978-1-84832-778-8
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#4252339 - 04/24/16 01:08 AM
Re: What are you reading in April
[Re: Top Gun]
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Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 10,304
ForSquirrels
Veteran
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Veteran
Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 10,304
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Just picked up The Martian for my Kindle today. I still need to find a way to make time to read more though.
"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it." --Mark Twain
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three rights make a left.
XBL: fmdckr81
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