For Questions That Don't Merit Their Own Thread

[DDE]

6 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Now why would you want two independent AAA guns on it? 
Much better to have one turret, with an radar and IR sensors and then mount 2-3 of these guns together. 
And the remote weapon station on top of the track looks weirs and kind of pointless as you have machine cannons. 
Now that thing would be nice other places like on an normal tank or an APC. 

It's an anti-infantry vehicle with a crew of 8, including nominally 5 dismounts. The whole point was to maximize the amount of independent weapons.

4 hours ago, K^2 said:

Unless you have nano-motors pulling countless fibers to actuate your limbs (hm, sounds familiar)

I know these experiments started back in the 2000s.

So it would seem the solution is to put some muscle on your muscle.

[kerbiloid]

Use pneumatics. Build a humanoid Pneumaton Automaton.

Upgrade. Use steam, make a Steamaton Automaton.

Then pilot any.

[K^2]

3 hours ago, DDE said:

I know these experiments started back in the 2000s.

So it would seem the solution is to put some muscle on your muscle.

The best result I've seen published so far was actually based on electrochemical reaction changing water potentials in electrolyte resulting in many tiny bladder cells expanding and contracting. It has ok range, strength mostly limited by strength of elastic materials used, and while it's still a little slow, it'd probably be enough for moving at walking pace, and I'm counting faster corrections you need for keeping balance, which is a great improvement over anything we've had before, and there might be room for improvement on speed. The biggest problem holding these from being practical that I can tell is that every contraction is basically a charge cycle of a super capacitor, and that tends to come with a lot of limitations in terms of life time. A thousand charge limit for a battery might not be terrible. Thousand contraction limits on a muscle is garbage outside some really niche uses. But again, that's something that can probably be greatly improved on, so I'm cautiously optimistic about this avenue.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

8 hours ago, wumpus said:

The Ray Tracing (at least as used in the current line of nvidia Turing processors) is almost certainly limited to lighting/shadow effects and reflections.  It is hardwired in, presumably for maximum efficiency of reflections.  Furthermore, using such a system would affect the "ingame world", meaning that in multiplayer you'd almost certainly have to have it either on for everybody or off for everybody.  With the possible exception of some future "Fallout 5" (and Bethesda corporate seems only interested in multiplayer and it's whales), I don't expect games written about single players, especially bothering to pioneer interactive virtual environments.

On the other hand, next gen consoles will have a sufficiently large "leveling effect" such that next-gen consoles could play together and be assumed to have sufficiently similar ray tracing hardware.  Once AMD (or Sony and/or Microsoft) spills the beans on how their ray tracing works (whether hard wired or using the shading/compute units to calculate the rays) we might get a better guess as whether this is possible or not.

One thing that nvidia relies on to make ray tracing works is large neural nets interpolating the results from the ray casters.  This was also shown separately as DLSS (deep learning super sampling) and really didn't work at all well.  DLSS2 appears to work better, and I'm guessing they are feeding the "AI" at least the mathematical bits of edge detection (similar to nvidia's previous work with FXAA anti-aliasing).  Assuming the player isn't using all the available neural net hardware to upscale the video, it might be useful to let these bits assist the NPC "AI" algorithms (hopefully not just making so-called "allies" even more annoying).

So - these are only going to be client side nice - to - haves for looks and immerseiveness? 

 

I'm guessing that is because they're not universal?

 

I just think it would be cool to move away from the RNG factoring of shots and impacts and move into a new Era of 'Shot goes where the gun is pointing' 

[ARS]

If a person A hold person C as a hostage by him as human shield at gunpoint to threaten B to drop his weapon (a classic situation of 'drop your weapon or I'll kill him'), if B has been given clearance to kill A, disregarding what movies told us about this situation, if B shoot A's head directly that it causes an instant kill, is it possible to save C? After all, A has a gun pointed not at B, and in theory, shooting the head should kill A before he could pull the trigger. Does a human body has enough reaction speed to process 'I've been shot in the head, now I pull the trigger' before a person is actually 'dead'?. In real life, what will B do? (disregarding any external support such as snipers, etc.)

[kerbiloid]

Immediate immobilization happens only if the bullet hits the medulla oblongata (because it's that, what produces any muscular activity, including finger, breathing, etc.). Other cases are stochastic.

Edited August 29, 2020 by kerbiloid

[K^2]

On 8/27/2020 at 12:57 PM, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Okay - new question:  

Does the ability to use Ray Tracing in the new / next generation of video cards give First Person Shooters (etc.) the ability to utilize the ray tracing part of the card to more effectively model physics of bullets, ricochets, and so on as they interact with the virtual environment - or are they strictly limited to lighting / shadow effects and reflections?

18 hours ago, wumpus said:

The Ray Tracing (at least as used in the current line of nvidia Turing processors) is almost certainly limited to lighting/shadow effects and reflections.  It is hardwired in, presumably for maximum efficiency of reflections.  Furthermore, using such a system would affect the "ingame world", meaning that in multiplayer you'd almost certainly have to have it either on for everybody or off for everybody.  With the possible exception of some future "Fallout 5" (and Bethesda corporate seems only interested in multiplayer and it's whales), I don't expect games written about single players, especially bothering to pioneer interactive virtual environments.

Ray tracing you get with RTX is generic and can be used for anything you want, including processing sound reflections and, if you really wanted to, calculating trajectories for projectiles. Moreover, there is nothing special about how the rays are actually traced, and almost identical ray-tracing shaders have been used in mainstream games for a while, typically limited to screen-space effects. Screen Space Reflections (SSR) are done with a kind of ray tracing technique, where the ray is traced against the depth buffer.

The actual bit of new hardware in RTX and upcoming RDNA 2 cards is dedicated BVH traversal hardware. This is critical if you want to be able to cast a lot of rays against level geometry. So for example, if you wanted to see a reflection of something that isn't otherwise in the shot, the ray traversal has to extend past the camera frustum, and then you have to rely on BVH to test for just likely intersections rather than trying to test ray against every single triangle in your entire scene. This is what takes ray tracing from niche use for a few FX to "Holly crap, we can render the whole scene with rays."

In practice, however, you're limited in how many rays you can cast per frame, and that limit gets more strict as you increase the scene complexity. There is some poorly-optimized geo in Control, for example, that really tanks the frame rate in just specific shots. So while a game with simple geometry can be fully rendered in real time with ray tracing, if you grab any modern AAA game, you'll have to budget your ray casts.

This is why most games currently use ray tracing for reflections, soft shadows, and global illumination (GI). These are areas where you can see the biggest improvements with fewest rays. It's not because the hardware is particularly good at doing these specific tasks. The graphics card doesn't care what you use a ray intersection test for. It just finds the nearest piece of geometry along the ray and gives you surface information at impact point.

 

With all of that in mind, back to the original question. Yes, you absolutely can set up a compute shader that runs ray tracing for every projectile in flight in the game and reports impacts pretty much instantly. You'd probably want to set it up as part of your general rendering flow, which means you'll technically be getting results with a 1 frame delay, but the impact on performance will be absolutely negligible. But unless you have millions of projectiles in flight on every single frame, there's just no reason to do it. Performance impact of tracing projectiles is already negligible in a modern game. On average, an FPS game is going to do more ray casts to see what ground everyone's walking on to see what FX should be played. And yeah, that can also be offloaded to GPU. In fact, because of how efficient these cards are at traversing BVH, you can offload a lot of collision detection to GPU. The problem is, most games aren't CPU-bound these days. So if your CPU is already not running at 100%, why would you move work over to GPU which is usually the bottleneck?

And @wumpus makes a good point about multiplayer. Except it's even worse. No self-respecting FPS is going to do hit detection on the client. Anything you don't want people cheating on has to be verified by the server, and most game servers don't even have a graphics card. So anything to do with core game logic still needs to live on CPU, and outside of that, there isn't a whole lot you need to do on client side that isn't rendering, usually.

 

One more note addressing something that @wumpus said about DLSS. I would argue that while nVidia has been pushing that tech heavily, the reason they have hardware for it on RTX has way more to do with denoising than supersampling. It goes back to having limited number of rays to cast, so nearly all of ray tracing is stochastic. For example, say I want to cast a soft shadow made by large glowing sphere. A typical technique would be to cast a ray from a point on the screen you're trying to light towards the glowing sphere. If you hit the sphere, the point you're drawing is at least partially lit. Otherwise, it's at least partially shadowed. But how much shadow and how much light? Well, that depends on how many rays hit. In theory, if you could cast hundreds of rays from every point, you'd have a pretty good light map. In practice, you sometimes have to live with just one ray per pixel on the screen, and you cast it towards the random spot on the glowing sphere. That makes penumbra hell'a noisy. And it's the deep learning denoiser that turns this dither map into a nice soft shadow you see on the screen. And within these constraints, denoising does incredibly well. In fact, major animation studios are starting to switch to denoising for their production. Last year at Siggraph, I got to see the noisy frames from Toy Story 4 taken from the stage of pipeline right before denoiser. That looked so bad! It's like somebody intentionally put a noise filter over it, then decided it wasn't enough, and cranked up the gain. But because denoiser has full access to the raw color, normal, and depth information, it can actually do amazing job reconstructing a softly lit scene with no discernible noise in final frame.

So yeah, that's the main purpose of including this piece of hardware on any ray tracing graphics card. In terms of how useful it is outside of that particular task, I don't really know. It sounds like DLSS was just an attempt to sell RTX cards in the market with so few games making use of the technology so far. Hopefully, with next gen consoles ray tracing will become common place. I don't know if it makes games look all THAT much better, but it can save us so much time, effort, and money developing games.

[Gargamel]

What powers a Dalek?

[DDE]

5 hours ago, ARS said:

If a person A hold person C as a hostage by him as human shield at gunpoint to threaten B to drop his weapon (a classic situation of 'drop your weapon or I'll kill him'), if B has been given clearance to kill A, disregarding what movies told us about this situation, if B shoot A's head directly that it causes an instant kill, is it possible to save C? After all, A has a gun pointed not at B, and in theory, shooting the head should kill A before he could pull the trigger. Does a human body has enough reaction speed to process 'I've been shot in the head, now I pull the trigger' before a person is actually 'dead'?. In real life, what will B do? (disregarding any external support such as snipers, etc.)

Well, you shouldn't actually disregard the snipers. They, and not person B, are usually the one that take the shot in such a situation. Consider them person D. Heck, IIRC the most elaborate training routines involve synchronized shots to break the glass in the way of the final bullet.

Spoiler

This is from a stand-off in China where the suspect had a knife. Person B is camouflage.

1 hour ago, Gargamel said:

What powers a Dalek?

Raw hatred.

Edited August 29, 2020 by DDE

[kerbiloid]

5 hours ago, Gargamel said:

What powers a Dalek?

They are evil bunnies inside.

Spoiler

 

[magnemoe]

20 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

So - these are only going to be client side nice - to - haves for looks and immerseiveness? 

I'm guessing that is because they're not universal?

I just think it would be cool to move away from the RNG factoring of shots and impacts and move into a new Era of 'Shot goes where the gun is pointing' 

Yes, its works for visual effect but for not like stuff like bullet trajectory and ricochets in an multi player game as all has to agree that the bullets do. 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

21 hours ago, ARS said:

If a person A hold person C as a hostage by him as human shield at gunpoint to threaten B to drop his weapon (a classic situation of 'drop your weapon or I'll kill him'), if B has been given clearance to kill A, disregarding what movies told us about this situation, if B shoot A's head directly that it causes an instant kill, is it possible to save C? After all, A has a gun pointed not at B, and in theory, shooting the head should kill A before he could pull the trigger. Does a human body has enough reaction speed to process 'I've been shot in the head, now I pull the trigger' before a person is actually 'dead'?. In real life, what will B do? (disregarding any external support such as snipers, etc.)

The real problem is that dying is difficult.  Nothing you see in the movies, where a person is shot and just drops is real.  So upon receiving a shock or injury sufficient to kill a person, the body begins fighting for life - regardless of whether it can succeed.  One of the things that happens is that every muscle tenses - if only for an instant... And if there is a finger on a trigger or a detonator - you can guess what happens next. 

Even outside of the automatic reaction - each person reacts to pain and shock differently - like being so shot full of holes there is no chance of survival, and still fighting to the bitter end.  The flip side of this is those people who have survivable injuries - but who freeze, and effectively give up, when they could have saved themselves.  The full spectrum can happen. 

That's the 'most case' scenarios   I am aware of, and refuse to describe, an exception - which would allow B to save C - but very few people can pull off the exception. 

 

Thus deescalation and negotiating are better strategies 

[magnemoe]

15 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

The real problem is that dying is difficult.  Nothing you see in the movies, where a person is shot and just drops is real.  So upon receiving a shock or injury sufficient to kill a person, the body begins fighting for life - regardless of whether it can succeed.  One of the things that happens is that every muscle tenses - if only for an instant... And if there is a finger on a trigger or a detonator - you can guess what happens next. 

Even outside of the automatic reaction - each person reacts to pain and shock differently - like being so shot full of holes there is no chance of survival, and still fighting to the bitter end.  The flip side of this is those people who have survivable injuries - but who freeze, and effectively give up, when they could have saved themselves.  The full spectrum can happen. 

That's the 'most case' scenarios   I am aware of, and refuse to describe, an exception - which would allow B to save C - but very few people can pull off the exception. 

 

Thus deescalation and negotiating are better strategies 

The problem with the B drops his weapon is that A now have two hostages, B obviously refuses this. Anybody suggesting this is insane so A will always refuse.  
And if A shoot C his swat team storm and cut down A as it might be hope to save C if A is not an problem. 

But yes A getting killed is very irrelevant if C if safe. This is one case there European police is probably more ruthless than US ones. 
An 50 year history of domestic terrorism who gotten way worse the last decades. 
If you get an hostage situations snipers is part of standard procedure. 

And it was one episode in Norway some 20 years ago some Eastern Europe gangsters wanted to play in the west, well you can not bribe cops, so they set an deadline, 4-5 minutes before it some car lights was very visible from the car with the kidnappers so they moved to look at it, they also moved their guns, Sniper 1 go, Sniper 2 go and execute. Not been any serious hostage scenarios later. Yes we had Breivk but that was terrorist attack not an hostage setting. 

 

 

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

On 8/30/2020 at 3:15 PM, magnemoe said:

The problem with the B drops his weapon is that A now have two hostages, B obviously refuses this. Anybody suggesting this is insane so A will always refuse.  
And if A shoot C his swat team storm and cut down A as it might be hope to save C if A is not an problem. 

But yes A getting killed is very irrelevant if C if safe. This is one case there European police is probably more ruthless than US ones. 
An 50 year history of domestic terrorism who gotten way worse the last decades. 
If you get an hostage situations snipers is part of standard procedure. 

And it was one episode in Norway some 20 years ago some Eastern Europe gangsters wanted to play in the west, well you can not bribe cops, so they set an deadline, 4-5 minutes before it some car lights was very visible from the car with the kidnappers so they moved to look at it, they also moved their guns, Sniper 1 go, Sniper 2 go and execute. Not been any serious hostage scenarios later. Yes we had Breivk but that was terrorist attack not an hostage setting. 

 

 

 

I did not read the question as requiring B to drop his weapon.  What I perceived is the classic 'movie hostage standoff' where A holds a weapon on C and threatens B by saying he'll kill C if B doesn't do... whatever.  In the movies, B can shoot through C to kill A (Lethal Weapon?), which is also a viable move in military situations where the risk A poses is greater than the possible loss of C to the mission*, or B can try for a headshot on A to save C... which I addressed is way harder than the movies portray - just a centimeter off and you fail to save C.  Yes, B dropping his weapon ends up being a stupid move, as you illustrate.

Again, given the 'classic movie situation' the negotiation and de-escalation route is often better.  It takes a hell of a lot of weapon knowledge and training to pull off the exception I referenced, and most 'highly trained' people can't do it... but exceptionally trained and talented and lucky can, if the situation requires - but again, the downside of missing or bad luck results in the death of C.  So you have to balance the life of C against the threat A  poses to --- whatever.

TBH - I have very little police training; I've cross-trained with FBI, LA SWAT, DEA and others, but our (military) approach is different from law enforcement.  Our roles and missions are wildy different - which is why you want police and other civil agencies dealing with domestic crime, civil unrest, etc. and NOT military.  Even our language is different (c.f. the "Cover Me!" fiasco when a cop asked a Marine for overwatch during the LA Riots -- "Cover Me" means something completely different in Marine parlance to what the cop intended).  Again, from a military standpoint - I'm going to approach the situation differently than a law enforcement type.  Given my ROE and threat assessment of A's overall risk to (again, whatever) will determine what I (if I'm B) do in the moment.  Frankly, I may be willing to lose C to eliminate A.  OTOH, if C is family and I'm B, who's just a guy facing off against a crazy A... that situation changes.

 

Point is - the movie situation where a person is shot and just dies is false.  I've seen and experienced people who are shot enough to die being able to kill people.  I've seen, and experienced people who did not need to die failing to do what was necessary to save themselves and bleeding out.  Combat is - as horrible as it's made out to be, and often worse than people want to believe.

You can go back to the guys on the plane that failed to hit it's target on 9/11... The passengers attempted to take out the terrorists.  Their decision - while it still cost them their lives, saved others.  "Lets Go" is a real thing - and in any situation, the actors 'estimate of the situation' often governs the outcome.

 

* we had Fedayeen push civilians into the line of fire in Iraq, and our Marines did a great job of killing the bad guys without killing the civilians - but the ROE, training and threat assessment govern those decisions.

Edited August 31, 2020 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[DDE]

10 hours ago, magnemoe said:

And it was one episode in Norway some 20 years ago some Eastern Europe gangsters wanted to play in the west, well you can not bribe cops

Eastern European cops are far more willing to appease hostage-takers without bribes, too. Budyonovsk demonstrated this on a four-digit scale, but the recent wave of often somewhat ridiculous cases in Ukraine demonstrates a similar pattern:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-man-policeman-hostage-grenade-poltava-today-a9633776.html

Quote

Police were trying to arrest a man suspected of hijacking a vehicle when he took out a grenade and threatened to kill one of the officers, Mr Gerashchenko said.

After negotiations, the man exchanged the police officer for a police colonel and drove off with him in a car provided by police.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/22/europe/ukraine-hostage-siege-zelensky-intl-scli/index.html

Quote

Zelensky spoke directly to the hostage-taker via phone, resulting in the release of three hostages, his press office said. Others were released after the Ukrainian president posted a short video on his official Facebook page saying: "Everybody watch the 2005 film 'Earthlings.'"
The documentary, narrated by Joaquin Phoenix, deals with the abuse and suffering of animals in industrial agriculture. Zelensky's video was deleted after Krivosh surrendered and the hostages were released. There were no reports of deaths or injuries.

I am sure "appeasement" and "wave of cases" have nothing to with each other.

[SOXBLOX]

Definitely an interesting question, ARS. 

From A's perspective, we can see a few options, but they depend on what B does. B will never drop his weapon, it always results in him losing barring outside intervention or A being careless. A can follow through with his threat and shoot C, or he can continue to hold C hostage. A will always continue to hold C hostage, since killing your ablative meat shield is a bad idea. Since B still poses a threat to A, A will attempt to eliminate B, provided  A does not need B for completing his nefarious plans or whatever.

So B should get behind something bulletproof that he can see and shoot around, and wait for A to surrender. I mean, A has to go to the bathroom, sleep, or drink something sometime, and you can't exactly sleep while holding a gun to someone's head. If B outlasts him, A has to give in. This, of course, assumes B has A's escapes covered. If not, then A will attempt to escape before he is outlasted, and will likely not take a hostage with him. He will either kill the hostage or leave the hostage, perhaps in a precarious situation to distract B from pursuing him.

So, B should use psychological warfare to grind down A, cover A's escapes, and prepare for a long wait. Or, he can gamble for a head shot on A, which will likely not work, as pointed out by @JoeSchmuckatelli above.

*also, when I say always in this post, I mean usually, mostly, or probably.

 

[Okhin]

23 hours ago, magnemoe said:

But yes A getting killed is very irrelevant if C if safe. This is one case there European police is probably more ruthless than US ones. 
An 50 year history of domestic terrorism who gotten way worse the last decades. 
If you get an hostage situations snipers is part of standard procedure.

Well …

Recent history in France disproves that. The shooting in Bataclan did not involved snipers. The two hostage situation after the Charlie Hebdo killing did not involve snipers. The assault on a flat filled with unknowed number of people, some of them might be having explosives devices in Saint Denis (after the Stade de France bombing, which happened the same day than the Bataclan shooting) did not involved snipers.

French police, even with their "elite" parts (such as BRI, RAID and GIGN) seems to consist of storming through the door with eleven officers, firing 1700 bullets in 3 hours of siege (while the opponents will fire only 11 ofit), have people blow themselves up and die and register around 5 injuries on the cops, most of them being friendly fires. And no snipers (they were sometimes deployed). No negotiators and no shutting down electrical power, internet access and communication toward the outside (which leads, in at least one case, to hostage takers being aware of the cop movement because of some live journalism from the scene and started killing of people).

Yeah. We have great police in Europe.

[TheSaint]

On 8/28/2020 at 8:06 AM, DDE said:

So it would seem the solution is to put some muscle on your muscle.

 

Electroactive Polymers. Granted it's an emerging field at this point, but it has great potential in this specific application. And it probably isn't as far off as we think.

 

On 8/28/2020 at 9:58 PM, ARS said:

If a person A hold person C as a hostage by him as human shield at gunpoint to threaten B to drop his weapon (a classic situation of 'drop your weapon or I'll kill him'), if B has been given clearance to kill A, disregarding what movies told us about this situation, if B shoot A's head directly that it causes an instant kill, is it possible to save C? After all, A has a gun pointed not at B, and in theory, shooting the head should kill A before he could pull the trigger. Does a human body has enough reaction speed to process 'I've been shot in the head, now I pull the trigger' before a person is actually 'dead'?. In real life, what will B do? (disregarding any external support such as snipers, etc.)

In general, central nervous system disruption (which is the clinical description of "blasting a cap in his gourd") would immediately prevent a subject from undertaking any voluntary actions. But taking such a shot is a bad idea for a number of reasons:

• Shots to the head are not, as presented in movies and video games, "instant kills". Most lethal action training actually discourages shooting at the head. It's a small target that is capable of quick movement, making it difficult to hit. Also, the skull is thick and hard; there are documented cases of pistol-caliber rounds striking at oblique angles and failing to penetrate target's skulls. There are also locations on the head where a round can penetrate and not inflict an incapacitating wound, such as the lower face. The actual area that you have to hit on the front of a target's head to be able to say, "This will absolutely, without a doubt, incapacitate the target," is extremely small, just a couple of square inches. Shooting at center-of-mass, in the upper torso, is a much more reliable way to stop a threat.
• The statistics on LEO accuracy don't support head shots either. The vast majority of officer-involved shootings take place at a range of 8-10 feet (roughly 2.5-3 meters). At those distances, on average, 80% of the shots fired by officers miss. And that is, in the great majority, shooting as trained, at center-of-mass. This isn't because LEOs are bad shots. It's because adrenaline is a hell of a drug. So, amped up on adrenaline in a high-stress situation, taking a shot at a couple of square inches in the middle of a perp's forehead? That is definitely not Plan A.
• Even if you do achieve a incapacitating hit, the target may experience involuntary convulsions, which may include flexing of their trigger finger. They are also going to fall to the ground in an uncontrolled manner, in close contact with the hostage, with their finger inside of the trigger guard of their weapon. So while the target is incapacitated and not making voluntary decisions anymore, they may still pull the trigger on their weapon and potentially inflict fatal harm on the hostage, the officer, or other bystanders.

So, this is actually one of the rare cases where the movie trope is true. In the situation you describe above, the SOP for most LEOs would be to attempt to deescalate the situation, not to lethally engage the perpetrator.

[K^2]

1 hour ago, TheSaint said:

Shots to the head are not, as presented in movies and video games, "instant kills". Most lethal action training actually discourages shooting at the head. It's a small target that is capable of quick movement, making it difficult to hit. Also, the skull is thick and hard; there are documented cases of pistol-caliber rounds striking at oblique angles and failing to penetrate target's skulls. There are also locations on the head where a round can penetrate and not inflict an incapacitating wound, such as the lower face. The actual area that you have to hit on the front of a target's head to be able to say, "This will absolutely, without a doubt, incapacitate the target," is extremely small, just a couple of square inches. Shooting at center-of-mass, in the upper torso, is a much more reliable way to stop a threat.

You kind of contradict yourself. Problem isn't that shot to CNS isn't an instant kill, which it basically is for any practical round, but that hitting CNS is hard for all the reasons you list. That said, it's the only guaranteed way to stop the target dead, both literally and metaphorically.

I'm not going to comment on hostage scenario, because I have neither training nor relevant expertise, but in more general context of firearm use, there is a reason why things like Mozambique Drill exist. Shot to the torso is the most reliable, as it presents the largest area with high stopping power and is the hardest to accelerate unpredictably, being tied to center of mass. But the stopping power of a torso shot is primarily due to pain response, so there are both psychological and pharmacological possible causes for this to fail to stop the target in some rare cases. If the first two shots to the torso have not stopped the target, the third and forth aren't going to either, and you might as well try and place a head shot. Best case scenario, you are wasting a round on a target that's already incapacitated and is going to bleed out anyways. Worst case, you might as well roll the dice on hitting the brain, because if the target is charging you with melee weapon, they'll probably do significant damage to you if you don't.

[SOXBLOX]

Came here to mention the Mozambique Drill double-tap, but K^2 beat me to it!

[Alsos]

Hi, i'm interested in the SRB-X shuttle derived lv but can't find that much on it. Most times people refer to it being "once described as the the single worst shuttle-derived launcher ever proposed" but I don't know where that comes from or who said it. Does anyone have an idea?

[DDE]

5 hours ago, TheSaint said:

The statistics on LEO accuracy don't support head shots either. The vast majority of officer-involved shootings take place at a range of 8-10 feet (roughly 2.5-3 meters). At those distances, on average, 80% of the shots fired by officers miss. And that is, in the great majority, shooting as trained, at center-of-mass. This isn't because LEOs are bad shots. It's because adrenaline is a hell of a drug. So, amped up on adrenaline in a high-stress situation, taking a shot at a couple of square inches in the middle of a perp's forehead? That is definitely not Plan A.

Reminds me of the FBI study that found next to no correlation between performance at the range and under fire.

1 hour ago, Alsos said:

Hi, i'm interested in the SRB-X shuttle derived lv but can't find that much on it. Most times people refer to it being "once described as the the single worst shuttle-derived launcher ever proposed" but I don't know where that comes from or who said it. Does anyone have an idea?

Statements like that rarely have a source. I can see why it's called that, though.

Spoiler

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

13 minutes ago, DDE said:

Reminds me of the FBI study that found next to no correlation between performance at the range and under fire.

Statements like that rarely have a source. I can see why it's called that, though.

  Hide contents

 

Very Kerbal

 

I think I used to build a lot of stuff that looks like that  -- especially when I did not know that side mounted stuff only accepted one mount - and I kept trying for two for extra stability.  Took me a while to learn that my extra explosive decouplers were actually the cause of the detonating rocket

[kerbiloid]

Once the medulla oblongata is destroyed, nobody can tense a muscle, including the finger ones.
(As well, the breathing ones, too, but that's a bonus). Only the heart muscles keep working for a minute or so, because they are stimulated indirectly, by the local chemical irritant.

It is not protected by thick bones, and lays on the intersection of axes "back head-spine joint" - "under ear" - "nose-lips triangle".

Of course, it's small. But also not made of steel.

Spoiler

Also, when a human is interested by something, he usually stops moving and listens keeping his head still. So, soft skills arre important, make the people interested in talking to you before shoot.
(Just theoretizing, don't do this at home.)

Edited September 1, 2020 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

Before WWII, the British were rather averse to the idea of storing their aircraft in the open in the deck given their typical operating climate. This led to the two-hanger and hangar-and-half designs. Meanwhile, the US had open hangar decks and a huge deck park - i.e. they were, at least on paper, specified to carry more aircraft than they could take below deck.

Afterwards, even as the US became more and focused on the former British home field in the North Atlantic, they still relied on the deck park and a single hangar deck.

What changed? And is there even an alternative? Do agoraphobics just have to accept an air group in the low 30s?