Weekend Reading

 Some longer or more involved reading:

• Another Weekend Knowledge Dump from Active Response Training.  Some of the more notable links:
• Concealed carry considerations for someone in a wheelchair. The author of this piece preferred a strong side, IWB holster. I knew a guy when I was younger that liked using a fanny pack.
• Greg links to an article entitled "The Self-Aid Imperative: Why Misunderstanding IFAKs Undermines Responder Survival" which discusses why it is a mistake to view the IFAK as a source of supplies for others and not your own first response to an injury.
• An article listing what the author believes to be the 5 best rimfire defensive loads, to which Greg also recommends Federal Punch whether in .22 LR or .22 Mag.
• Pew Pew Tacticals list of the best prepping and survival websites. 
• Downloadable photo-realistic sniper targets. 

• "SHOT SHOW 2026"--Active Response Training. A bunch of Shot Show links with commentary by Greg Ellifritz.
• A little off the beaten track: "Collections: Roman Infantry Tactics: Why the Pilum and not a Spear?" An excerpt:

How would this perform in combat? Older testing by Peter Connolly and newer testing by Tod Todeschini both seem to confirm a maximum effective range of around c. 25-30m or so; as ranged weapons go, these are relatively close-in ones. The shield and even armor penetrating potential of the weapon is considerable: once the point has punched through a shield (or armor), the long shank is thinner than the hole the point has created, allowing the weapon to continue moving with the momentum (and if thrown in a relatively high arc, the weight) of the heavy wooden haft pushing it forward. With long shanks anywhere from 50 to 100cm, that’s enough length for the weapon to potentially punch through a shield and then keep going to strike the man behind it and experiments with reconstructed versions generally seek to back up this application.

• The truth is out there? "Inside the 70-Year Military Investigation of Aliens in Brazil"--Folha de S. Paulo. 
• "The Trillionaires of Mars" by Devon Eriksen. He argues that the first entity to establish a Mars colony will be the universe’s first trillionaire. Mars is the gateway to the asteroid belt. 

    The value of Mars isn’t the balmy weather, the fresh air, or even Deja Thoris in a chainmail bikini. 

    It’s the fact that here you have a planet, where people can live in sealed habitats (above or below the surface), and it’s really, really easy to throw things into space, and get them to and from the asteroid belt.

    In other words, if Earth is the suburbs, and the Belt is the mine, Mars is your industrial zone.

    Hell, you don’t even need to mine asteroids in place.

    Depending on the delta-v cost, you can just attach boosters to your smaller rocks and push them right into Mars orbit. It’s called a Hohmann transfer. But whether you are moving metal from a mobile refinery, raw ore, or entire rocks, cargo is cheap to move in space, at least compared to space launch from Earth’s surface.  

And what will we find in the asteroid belt? An example from the article:

One single asteroid, 16 Psyche, some 140 miles across, has an estimated [mineral] value at today’s market prices of 100 quadrillion dollars. You read that right. That’s roughly 900 times the value of the entire world economy.