Reference or knowledgebase section

[Vorpalis]

Do we have a reference or knowledgebase forum? I've looked around, but haven't been able to find one. I think that would be a good place to pin knowledge-heavy threads or posts from Subject Matter Experts, so they're easy to find.

On that subject, I have PDFs of a number of well-regarded texts that I think many people here would be interested in. I'd like to share them, but I'm not sure where they should go. They're also rather large, ranging from 10MB to 500MB, and I don't know if this would be a problem. The titles I'd like to share:

• Chinn's The Machine Gun (7 files, 503 MB total)
• Rheinmetall's 1982 edition of their Handbook on Weaponry (1 file, 11 MB)
• Oerlikon's Pocketbook (5 files, 98 MB total)
• The U.S. Army's 1968 edition of Technical Notes on Small Arms Design (1 file, 57 MB)
• The DoD's The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 3rd ed. (83 MB)
• SORO Casebook on Insurgencies (1 file, 81.4 MB)
• The U.S. Army SOC's ARIS Casebook on Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare, Vol. II 1969 - 2009 (1 file, 17.2 MB)
• U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit's Pistol Marksmanship Training Guide (1 file, 2.3 MB)
• The course textbook from W. Marshall Thompson's class on manufacturing primers (1 file, 1 MB)

The Rheinmetall and Oerliken texts are a bit obscure, so, briefly, they're each a compendium from that company's engineers, containing their cumulative knowledge on the design, engineering, manufacture and employment of modern weapons. My jaw actually dropped, and stayed there, the first time I browsed those texts.

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[The Heretic]

The old texts are very detailed and informative - unlike the newer texts that are often very light on info and poorly researched.

I have Chinns book and a number of others like it. They were not cheap to buy - often over $100 per book, but worth every penny if you want to really understand firearms.

The downside is that they are somewhat dated - e.g., you won't find anything about the FN P90 in most of them or any of the newer firearms. But what they do have is good.

I did ask that we have a sticky for answering questions about firearms transfers in Orygun/Washington as we get those quite often and it is often the same questions over and over again. But I heard nothing but cricketts.

 

[Vorpalis]

@The Heretic, if you've read other books on the subject, I'm curious if you've read and could comment on three others on my to-read list:
Ballistics: Theory and Design of Guns and Ammunition by Donald Carlucci and Sidney Jacobsen
Principles of Firearms by Charles Edward Balleisen
Mechanical Engineering: Principles of Armament Design by H. Peter (Paperback)

Eh, I don't mind them being dated. There have been a lot of new firearms, but there haven't been very many new ideas or technologies. The extensive use of polymer, like in the P90, is one of them. Besides, I have a lot left to learn from those old books.

 

[The Heretic]

I have two ballistics related books

Understanding Ballistics by Robert A. Rinker

Bullet Penetration - Modeling the dynamics and the Incapacitation Resulting from Wound Trauma

The latter is was written by an actual rocket scientist and endorsed by Fackler.