sholio: sun on winter trees (Default)
Here's an esoteric historical question for you: what did WWII-era soldiers in the field do with the packaging from c-rations and other trash of that nature? My intuitive feeling is that they'd just drop it wherever they happened to be, because a) carrying useless weight is highly impractical when you're tired and underfed and people are trying to kill you, and b) our modern-day cultural value regarding "littering is bad" had yet to take hold, and wasn't really something most people thought about, so just chucking a can into the bushes was a perfectly valid way of dealing with it, if you didn't have an immediate use for it.

(For that matter, my general experience has been that there's still sort of an urban/rural divide about it, with a lot of rural/semi-rural people not really thinking too much about dealing with trash in the old-fashioned "just drop it wherever" style. We're always having to clean up after hunters and picnickers in the gravel pit. Read a book not too long ago on Montana ranching that describes how one ranch where the writer worked as a ranch hand would just bulldoze the bodies of dead cows off a handy nearby cliff. Out of sight, out of mind!)

It's a strangely difficult detail to find via googling, though.
sholio: sun on winter trees (Default)
Hi flist! There are two scenes in my original novel that involve one character teaching another one some basic swordfighting moves, and I am trying to find someone who knows something about practical combat who can look over them for me and tell me if I am making any really stupid mistakes. It's a tricky thing to research because it's not any specific swordfighting school and it involves a magic sword that does a lot of the work for you, and the person who's learning to use it will be wielding it against magical monsters rather than other people with swords. So it's sort of a combination of "here are some basic stabby things to do with a sword" and "staying alive in a fight 101". Level of real-world plausibility, on a scale of one to 10, is probably about a 3. *g* But I would like, if possible, to avoid giving the impression that this scene was written by a person who knows absolutely nothing about fighting.

I asked some questions about these scenes a year or so ago, when I was originally writing the rough draft of the novel, so I know there is one person who reads my journal (or used to) who has some pretty solid swordfighting knowledge (and gave me extremely useful feedback on the original post!), but I don't know how to contact you because you're anon. I'm not fishing for that specific person, necessarily, but for anyone who would be willing to review two fight-training scenes which are cumulatively about 2000 words and give me feedback on their general plausibility.

Please email me if you can help: - layla at ravenschildren dot com.

ETA: I think I'm pretty well hooked up! Thank you guys SO much!
sholio: sun on winter trees (Sheppard hand with gun)
(I really *did* try to answer this via Google and visiting various military research sites before bothering you people. Really!) I swear I knew this once upon a time, but I don't seem to know it anymore.

The standard SGA pistol sidearm ... what make and model is it? Or do they use different ones? And how many rounds would a clip most likely contain?

ETA: A couple of people directed me to this very useful link: http://community.livejournal.com/atlantis/244926.html. I also found this site that talks about when and why the US military adopted the M9 and how many rounds are in a standard clip: http://www.ideamarketers.com/?beretta_92f_and_m9_semiauto_pistol&articleid=741381
sholio: sun on winter trees (Sheppard hand with gun)
(I really *did* try to answer this via Google and visiting various military research sites before bothering you people. Really!) I swear I knew this once upon a time, but I don't seem to know it anymore.

The standard SGA pistol sidearm ... what make and model is it? Or do they use different ones? And how many rounds would a clip most likely contain?

ETA: A couple of people directed me to this very useful link: http://community.livejournal.com/atlantis/244926.html. I also found this site that talks about when and why the US military adopted the M9 and how many rounds are in a standard clip: http://www.ideamarketers.com/?beretta_92f_and_m9_semiauto_pistol&articleid=741381
sholio: sun on winter trees (Sheppard moody)
In the course of doing research for an original novel I'm writing, I stumbled across this: Dictionary of Antarctic Slang. As the name says, it's an assortment of slang used by people stationed in Antarctica, mostly acronyms and terms for various places. I thought it might be useful for anyone writing about Sheppard's time in the Antarctic.
sholio: sun on winter trees (Sheppard moody)
In the course of doing research for an original novel I'm writing, I stumbled across this: Dictionary of Antarctic Slang. As the name says, it's an assortment of slang used by people stationed in Antarctica, mostly acronyms and terms for various places. I thought it might be useful for anyone writing about Sheppard's time in the Antarctic.

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