View From The Porch

Tuesday, October 06, 2026

Unusual Kill

One of the F/A-18F Super Hornets that had been operating off the USS Abraham Lincoln was photographed while returning to its home base in San Diego sporting an unusual kill marking on its snout...

On Oct. 1, a Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet that flew from the USS Abraham Lincoln on combat missions in the Iran war was spotted returning home to California with an unusual kill marking. Above rows of other icons representing bombs the plane had dropped was a submarine split in half, embossed with the words “Sub Buster.”

Monday, October 05, 2026

But Tam, a .40?

The problems with .40S&W came from a couple areas.

For starters, most of the early .40 pistols were hastily converted from 9x19mm designs and that's understandable, since part of the design brief of the cartridge was that it fit in 9mm blasters. The USP was designed around the cartridge, and the Smith & Wesson Third Gen autos were beefy chonks that were easily up to the job.

SIG Sauer wisely realized that the original P-22x architecture, with a separate breechblock held in a stamped slide by a roll pin, would not be up to the job and came up with the milled slide P-229 for the role.

On the other hand you had pistols that were really marginal for the chambering. Beretta 96's ate locking blocks like popcorn, relative to their 9mm siblings. Even the ubiquitous Glock 22/23 pistols had issues, being more prone to feeding issues from improper grip or a mounted weaponlight than their sewing machine reliable 9x19 progenitors.

Also, in typical duty loads there just wasn't enough difference in terminal results to justify the loss in ammo capacity and the reduction in shootability. No matter how good you shoot .40S&W, you shoot 9x19mm better.

That being said, it's not like the chambering doesn't work. It works great. It was specifically designed to meet the current benchmarks in terminal performance; it was "taught to the test", to steal a term from education jargon. You can pick up some really great LE trade-in SIG and HK pistols in .40 for a song these days. Ammo's more expensive, sure, but if you aren't going to be shooting it a ton, who cares?

Facing Monday With A Meme Dump!

Sunday, October 04, 2026

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #266...

Heckler & Koch's USP (the initials stood for Universal Self-loading Pistol in German, "Universelle Selbstladepistole") hit the market in the early Nineties.

In some ways it was forward-thinking. It used a polymer frame, which HK had pioneered with its VP70 pistol, and was designed around the .40S&W. That latter trait, as well as the hammer-fired traditional double action were both because the goal of the pistol was big sales in the U.S. law enforcement market.

HK fans at the time tended to be attracted to the quirky engineering of pistols like the roller-delayed blowback P9S and the squeeze-cocking gas-delayed P7, so the USP, with its conventional Browning tilting-barrel short-recoil setup felt like a bit of a betrayal. I remember referring to it as the Ultimate Sellout Pistol on forums in the Nineties, because I was a big ol' gun nerd who worshipped at the altar of the P7.

The date code on this one indicates a 1995 production gun. This one being a .40S&W piece, plus the fact that it only had two ten-round magazines in the box, meant it was dirt cheap, at least by HK standards, so I thought it might be fun to play with.

Alas, standard capacity USP40 full-size magazines are sheer unobtainium right now, but that's not that urgent a problem. Besides, HK's ban-era mags work fine, unlike the 10-round Glock mags. (Glock narrowed the mags internally, while HK just plugged them from the bottom, retaining the standard double-column internals.)