Because space is haunted. And buckshot’s superior spread helps ensure a hit while spinning around in zero-g. Solid slugs would go straight through the soyuz walls, duh.
Long-time space journalist Jim Oberg called it “a deluxe all-in-one weapon with three barrels and a folding stock that doubles as a shovel and contains a swing-out machete.”
The attack in space angle was probably just to convince some manager.
The survival in Siberia is completely valid. US retrieves their astronauts in the ocean, but Soviet Russia didn’t/doesn’t have such a worldwide navy, so Siberia it is. It could take days for the cosmonauts to be recovered, so it was expected they might need to defend themselves against wildlife or even hunt.
Heat dissipation is an issue since there’s no air around to cool the barrel, although for this three shot weapon (two shotgun one rifle) it wouldn’t be a problem. This gun is mostly to fend off bears when you land in Siberia.
Yes, I guess? But firing a gun inside a spacecraft would be a bad idea… and also firing it while spacewalking would be a bad idea unless you were very sure that you were very well braced & tethered.
You could load it with very small, light, or soft pellets, they don't need to be very damaging to make a hole in a suit which would be near certainly fatal.
Well, considering that many early spacecraft and space stations were running oxygen rich atmospheres, it would probably mean the end of anyone involved in a rather spectacular fireball.
Good times, playing nibbles / gorillas with my siblings. I never got into programming as an adult, but I got quite into making stuff with QBasic as a kid. We used to make very annoying programs to take to school and unleash upon the poor beleagured IT department.
Spent some time with QB but QuickPascal was the first decent compiler I really used. It was just MS trying to compete with Turbo but it was enough for me.
I wasn’t here for this, but my first exposure was when my uncle showed me BASICA on Windows 98. Then I started playing around with VB 6. The rest was history.
Now I am a full-time backend engineer mostly doing Python & Linux programming. Not sure where I’d end up otherwise.
I tried writing an “operating system” in QBasic. Yes, I was that ignorant and optimistic at the same time. I still have the code. Standard VESA driver, high resolutions. Wrote my own terrible scripting language. But it was fun doing that. These days I rarely find any programming fun. It’s all tedious and dealing with middleware issues.
A few months ago I was tasked with translating a script from one IBM emulator program to another because the owners of the first program wouldn’t respond to requests to purchase a new license.
The scripting language used on both was unique to the software, and the documentation was basically non-existent. Plus, the script was written over a decade ago, and the guy who wrote it was long gone.
For weeks I banged my head against the wall trying to figure out the logic flow before I realized that it was essentially BASIC, which I haven’t touched in over 20 years.
I started my programming career with Turbo Basic and Visual Basic 3. The one thing missing from these languages that makes me wonder how the hell I did anything at all is classes. I vaguely remember using arrays for all sorts of weird shit but that’s it.
Like others in here, my first “hacking” was manipulating the included programs bundled with qbasic. One time I thought I’d be clever and make Nibbles add one life instead of subtract one when a collision was detected.
I quickly realized my mistake when a higher level became impossible and there was no way to quit (I don’t recall if ctrl-c worked for those programs).
This was, also, my first programming language ever. Oh the memories of typing it in from one of those books on the one computer we had in our classroom…
Oh man. Great memories here. I wrote some BBS software using this. I never got to actually run my BBS, though, since I was a kid and my dad didn’t want to pay for a second line.
Like yours though, it never went anywhere and was literally just a simple framework with nothing to run in it.
Why are you talking about the QBasic sprite-based RPG "engine" I wrote in 1999? I was very proud that you could move the selection box with the arrow keys.
Of course, I was also in college and not a tween, so maybe English was the right degree path for me after all.
My "completed" QB projects were (1) a text-based "RPG" set in the era of the historical Macbeth, with (IIRC) five scripted encounters, and (2) a single-player Star Wars "Sabacc" card game based on 90% of the rules listed in the old West End Games sourcebook. The "AI" was a set formula not unlike the newbie blackjack rules posted everywhere. I think. Maybe that was planned for v2 though. I was fairly proud of the graphics engine that imported text files and assigned colors to pixels based on which ASCII character you'd used.
These days, I don't do anything more complex than editing keyboard configurations in KMK.
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