MichaBenToby

22 Aug 2025

@owenjones.bsky.social seems perfectly happy with comments like this on his posts as I've tagged him in them many times but he does nothing about them. I can only assume that he is ok with these kinds of sentiments and having followers who espouse them and it's not just one post. It's all of them.

9 July

So, if you saw a political satire program like "Yes minister" or "in the thick of it" do an episode where an MP and leader of a party resigned so he could fight a by-election against a man with a bin on his head, you'd think the writers had run out of ideas and just decided to jump the shark O.o

13 June 2025

@channel4news.bsky.social @krishgm.bsky.social Channel 4 News Interviewing the Iranian advisor on their nuclear program. Accused Israel of only ever targeting civilians. Krishnan Guru-Murthy says nothing. Says Israel did nothing to their nuclear program. Krishnam Guru-Murthy says nothing.

13 June 2025

Says Israel attacked "unprovoked" Krishnan Guru-Murthy says nothing. Goes on a rant about children being thrown out of buildings and other rubbish that didn't happen Krishnan Guru-Murthy says nothing. Says Iran never targets civilians KGM says nothing. Good job they're not biased ay? 🙄

3 Dec 2024

Well isn't this place just lovely? 😁

23 Nov 2024

WIP of my Celestine conversion. Got a bit to go yet. Gonna turn the tree into a cherry tree with blossom, swap the spear tip for a simulacrum imperialis and possibly change the steps so the have the names of the saints on them. Or the initials anyway.

21 Nov 2024

Here are some pics of Ralfy pretending not to be a little git. 😆❤️

21 Nov 2024

My cat Ralphy asserting dominance 😁

So today's brain worm is how much food would a Tyranid Hive ship need each day? To the..er...biology mobile? I guess? So! The biggest creature ever to exist on our planet is the blue whale 🐳 It can get up to 30m long (that's about 98ft in freedom units) and can weigh about 199 tones. Him Chonk!

Scaling that up we get a Nidship needing between 5 and 13 *billion* calories a day! Now your average imperial citizen contains around 125,822 calories. [Which is why corpse starch is so nutritious =I= ] Er…yeah… so a Nidship would need to eat, on average, 87,000 people a day.

Which given planets can contain billions actually makes mathematical sense O.o When combined with the rest of a planets biomass a Tyranid Hive fleet would actually be able to feed itself fine and then hibernate between planets. GW actually got the numbers right! I'm amazed at how well that works 😆

A Tyranid Hive ship on the other hand is, and I quote, "the size of an imperial battleship". Looking that up that's 8km long O.o that's roughly 266 times bigger Ok so how much food does a blue whale eat? Well that would be a mere 10-20 tonnes! That's 20-50 million calories.

Boltguns. How much of a mess of you will they actually make? So according to GW your average bolter fires "coke can sized rocket propelled rounds with explosive tips that detonate slightly after impact to ensure maximum penetration before detonation".

Now we have the video evidence of what a 50 Cal round does to the human head above. Now realise that a bolt round, just on impact, delivers 17 times more force, pierces armour *AND THEN EXPLODES* 😱🤯

Suddenly it makes sense that these weapons quite happily kill Space marines in power armour and utterly annihilate anyone less tough and not wearing re-enforced concrete O.o

We know it's 52 times bigger however it's not a solid slug, there's propellant and High explosive in there as well. I'll spare you the maths on volumes of a cylinder but assuming all propellant is gone and it takes up roughly half the round I'm guessing the mass is probably around 400g on impact.

That seems fair given a full can of coke is 380g and given that a) this round is half empty and b) I doubt bolt rounds are made of thin aluminium. So! Putting the numbers through our formula we get: 50cal putting out 8,676 joules And the bolt round putting out 150,893j and then it explodes. O.o

Our 1960's gyrojet could barely scrape Mach 1 however I think it's fair to say that 38,000 years later the technology would exist to at least double that speed so we'll say a bolt round goes the same speed as a 50 Cal round. If nothing else it makes my life easier 😝

Now! The good bit! The formula for the Kinetic energy (in Joules)of a bullet is K.E=1/2mv² where, m is the mass of the bullet and v is its velocity . Now we know our velocity so we just need our mass! Mass of a 50 Cal bullet is 23g but what about a bolt round?

Introducing the gyrojet! An actual rocket propelled bullet that is actually a real thing invented in the 1960's and, unfortunately, pretty rubbish 😔 However they are good enough to get our comparison from! Huzzar! Now a bullet reaches maximum velocity in the barrel and slows down from there.

A gyroget/bolt round however reaches maximum velocity at the end of it's fuel. Meaning, in theory, it can impart more force than a bullet of equivalent size fired over the same range. The muzzle velocity of a 50 Cal round is 1943mph or roughly Mach 2.3.

Ok. So now we have a benchmark for exploding people. A 50 Cal bullet has a diameter of 12.7mm The modern 330ml coke can has a diameter of 662mm making it roughly 52 times the size. And it has an armour piercing tip and a high explosive payload.

Now usually to compare how nasty bullets are we'd compare muzzle energy to see how much force they're putting out but there's a hitch. Bolt rounds are rocket propelled so that kind of renders that moot...

youtu.be50 Cal VS. Human HeadYouTube video by Garand Thumb

That is literally as close to a bolt round as we're going to get. Fortunately they're ridiculously expensive to make so massively impractical for military use and don't do much more damage than a solid slug. No for what a bolt round does we're going to have to get bigger...

youtu.be50 Cal VS. Human HeadYouTube video by Garand Thumb

The 50 Cal round doesn't have an explosive tip but it will still make your head explode when it hits you. For the exact effect have a look here: youtu.be/BQAfHvpv6uk?...

Now we have actually invented exploding bullets but they're banned by international convention on weapons that leave "unnecessarily cruel wounds". (But grenades are fine. Go figure.) Anywho they're weaksauce compared to what a bolter can do. Honourable mention for the "Frag 12" round for shotguns.