As our host asks, here is a place for all those corrections and small mistakes.

We had at least two threads like this one, both already closed, Proofreading and Mistake?.

Some previous tidbits, (VH, Viking hardcover), though I have lent my copy of SC so I cannot fill the gaps. I should recover it next week-end:

• The egregious Alejandro instead of Alberto (VH 202, Breakbulk).
  
  
• Hollis rents a Passat (VH 132, The international currency of bad shit) but returns a Jetta (239, To give them the pleasure). Talk about a VW downgrade!
  
  
• There's also a reference to the Sultan of Dubai. No such person. (the scene on Union Square).
  
  
• On page 172,
  
  quote:
  Inchmale, she guessed was sitting up in business class, headed for New York, reading the Economist, a magazine he read...
  
  Properly, its The Economist. Its one of the few publications where 'The' is a proper part of the title.
  
  
• (Potential/disputed) Pg. 259
  
  "a Ford Taurus with a Budget sticker"
  
  In 2007, the mid-size Ford rental from
  Budget is the "500". The Taurus is 3-years
  gone from inventories. (Even in backwaters
  like Vancouver.) Discussions over how many Taurus could remain in February 2006.
  
  
• (no page number) It is Pete Townshend, not Townsend.
  
  
• Winchester makes Silvertips. Not Remington (MOM was first). But WG already knows that.
  

More to come...

This message has been edited. Last edited by: The Psychophant,

I just looked on the Budget.ca website and it lists "Ford Taurus or similar" and I'm pretty sure I've seen them around...I know you guys are research monsters, but is there really no possibility of getting a Taurus here now? I'ma look on the lot tonight after work if I can remember.

And yes, they do have stickers here.

What about the Ellegua/Eleggua mispelling?

Hold, I'll find it...

Here:

quote:

Originally posted by ILACISN:
ok i hope it isn't me, but i think theres a spelling mistake in Spook Country, on page 90, chapter 18, Eleggua's Window, you spell Eleggua like that, on the next page, 5 paragraphs down, 5 words in, it is spelled Ellegua's window... now correct me if im COMPLETELY missing something, but to me that seems wrong.

http://williamgibsonboard.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/7801097133/m/7201098753

It looks like it's supposed to be Eleggua.

Does anyone remember what the L.A. mistake(s) was/were?


There are evidently some gun-stuff errors, and at least one LA reader has had geographical quibbles...


I thought it had to do with Tower Records but am likely wrong.

What is the alleged problem with "Remington Silvertips" anyway ?

The Winchester Ammunition online catalog shows several calibres of Remington branded rifle cartridges in the Ballistic Silvertip product range, as well as WInchester, Springfield, Ruger etc. branded versions.

e.g. SBST280 280 Remington Supreme® Ballistic Silvertip® 180 gr.

quote:

Supreme® Ballistic Silvertip®: Solid based boat tail design delivers excellent long range accuracy. In .22 calibers, the Ballistic plastic polycarbonate Silvertip® bullet initiates rapid fragmentation.

In medium to larger calibers special jacket contours extend range and reduce cross-wind drift. Harder lead core ensures proper bullet expansion.

Description: Rapid controlled expansion, Massive knockdown, moderate penetration.

Given that the customised ammunition must replace some of the Lead core with the less dense radioactive Caesium brachytherapy capsule (some of which use Titamium to enclose a Caesium compound, rather than highly chemically reactive Caesium metal)), then all the standard published figures for accuracy and penetration (of flesh and bone hunting targets) must be wrong.

Has anyone actually tested this on real Corten corrugated shipping container steel or used a Finite Element Analysis or other computational fluid dynamics simulation ?

Punching holes in the angled corrugations would need more penetration, compared with the flat bits, which is what the painted magnetic discs are for.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Memetic Engineer,

I think it's maker vs ammunition type.



And I can't check what caliber the rifle had (my brother still has my copy of SC) but I would expect something bigger then .22.

quote:

Originally posted by Hasa:

And I can't check what caliber the rifle had (my brother still has my copy of SC) but I would expect something bigger then .22.

[page 332 VH]

quote:

"Thirty-calibre. Ten-twist, four groove barrel."

I figured the rifle he was writing about was the WA 2000.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_WA_2000

The Walther is directly out because it is semiautomatic, rather than bolt action.

My own preferences was a Blaser 93 Tactical, which looks suitably skeletal, but the .300 WM barrel (to use those heavy silvertips) has six grooves and a 1:11" ratio. A pity because the linear bolt action fits so well the shooting description.

Ze French accent. Eet iz all 'ronng!

quote:

Originally posted by ContritePuppy:
I figured the rifle he was writing about was the WA 2000.

Someone's been playing Hitman.

quote:

Originally posted by Psychophant:
My own preferences was a Blaser 93 Tactical

Someone's been playing Hitman.



It also depends if he was using 30 cal as the diameter of the bullet, or as the actual name of the cartridge (30-06, or 30 Winchester.)

Of course, fitting in with WG, it may well have been a custom rifle, or some rare test platform, with a wildcat cartridge.

I don't know why he'd want a softpoint for punching metal, either.

pg. 57
"Brown lay beneath New Yorker sheets and one of those beige hotel blankets that sandwich a sheet of plastic foam between layers of polyester moleskin"

It should be mohair rather than moleskin - as in mohair wool velvet (used for upholstery).

But it's from Milgrim's POV, so it's *his* error.

History of the Vellux hotel blanket

quote:

Originally posted by Psychophant:
The Walther is directly out because it is semiautomatic, rather than bolt action.

Point.

I don't see in the book where it's described as "skeletal." He has a sentence about the wooden stock though and a thumb hole "carved" in in the gun. I suppose that's what brought the WA 2000 to mind.

Lithos: I didn't learn of the WA 2000 from playing Hitman, I learned about it from playing Twilight 2000 when I was ten or eleven.

quote:

Originally posted by Fashionpolice:
pg. 57
"Brown lay beneath New Yorker sheets and one of those beige hotel blankets that sandwich a sheet of plastic foam between layers of polyester moleskin"

It should be mohair rather than moleskin - as in mohair wool velvet (used for upholstery).

Could well be moleskin.

quote:

Originally posted by Fashionpolice:
But it's from Milgrim's POV, so it's *his* error.

Milgrim seems like the kind of guy who knows his fabrics, though. I would guess this is unintentional.

Moleskin is that soft beige stuff, haven't you seen those kind of blankets? I knew exactly what he was referring to!

ETA: It's a Martex Vellux blanket. They have them in hotels a lot, apparently because they withstand repeated high-temperature washing.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: theminx,

There are two schools of thought concerning made up (or partially remembered/partially made up) authorial data. One would be to make the work fit with the outside world. The second would be to look in the wide world for some tidbit fitting the available data. The ultimate step in this way would be to make reality the imaginary item. As the black Buzz Rickson embodies, I prefer this second approach.

This is bound to be dry and boring, so skipping is recommended for no-gunheads. Oh, and I have not played Hitman, either.

This is a typical brachytherapy Cs-137 source. Of the kind an independent operator with money could easily acquire (This is probably more than you want to know about brachytherapy). So in this case we have a 3.05 mm diameter stainless steel tube, 21 mm long. The other example is 2.65 mm diameter, 20 mm long.

Then let's see what we know about the rifle. That ambiguous caliber, thirty, and then 4 groove and 1/10 ratio. That kills me, because there is no comercial Remington caliber that is associated with 30. 7 mm is .284, close but not enough.

At first, continental european with a metric background and no guns, I assumed the thirty was a reference to the most popular modern sniper cartridge, the .300 Winchester Magnum (available as Silvertips). However, checking different rifles, most barrels for this and other very powerful cartridges use six (or more) grooves, rather than four, though almost always with a 1:10 twist. As well, checking some American web pages, thirty is used quite interchangeably to refer to the various cartridges used by the USArmy (.30-06 and .308, which for me was simply 7.62 NATO). By the way, I do know they the civilian .308 and the military 7.62x51 are very slightly different, but that does not affect the discussion.

Now that was an interesting tidbit because although the .30-06 is extinct in that which concerns modern rifles, 7.62 NATO still has a good health, due to the huge number of weapons around that use it. That also means that most modern sniper rifles are offered in this caliber, a big plus from the story point of view. It is also generally used in 4 grooved barrels, although the twist ratio is usually 12 or 11 (my preferred rifle candidate for aesthetic reasons, the Blaser Tactical, has 11). This twist ratio affects the size of bullets that can be fired, the lower the twist, the heavier the bullets, and it is perfectly possible to make a custom barrel if necessary for the bullets you intend to fire. Generally 1:12 would limit a .30 bullet to a weight of 168 grains (10.89 g), while a 1:10 would allow a weight in the 190 grains range (12.3 g). It is less punishing than other, more powerful cartridges, so it can be fired more quickly. There are silvertips for it, though they are in no way associated with Remington. As the author seems already convinced the Remington will have to go, that is not an obstacle.

So, returning to those Cs-137 brachytherapy loads, would they fit in a 7.62mm round, without affecting (much) the behaviour? Diameter clearly will not be a problem, but length clearly could be. Standard bullet length would be 1.13", 28.7 mm. Considering that the caesium cell has a diameter of 3 mm or less, we have enough length to keep the spitzer shape and even the typical penetrating point of a silvertip. The main difference is that instead of a heavy soft lead core there will be a lighter (stainless steel and caesium chloride) core. Besides the ballistics problems that would cause, the bullet weight will undoubtedly be lower than normal, some 2-3 grams at least, so once again we would be doing better using a 1:12 twist rather than the 1:10. The .308 silvertips are made in 150 or 168 grains, aiming for that optimum accuracy at 1:12 twist.

However if someone disassembled the brachytherapy beads (either 1.5x5 mm or 1.5 mm diameter) and encased them in lead, you could keep much of the weight (and probably not needing such a heavy containment case, but that is always subjective).

My own choice would be to use custom bullets, longer and therefore heavier, to increase the caesium load per bullet, but keeping the hard tip and soft core of the Silvertip philosophy. Always assuming .308 is the right bullet. That would require a shorter twist to get a good accuracy out of those bullets, so we keep the 1:10".

Now, the rifle. I still have not recovered my copy of SC, so I am not sure of the description, but at the moment I keep my mental image of a Blaser rifle, one shot (they make magazinless bolt action rifles for target shooting), with linear bolt action and a custom barrel. And despite the shape, many people buy wood rather than plastic stocks.

Something like this...



Of course that is my own preconceptions colouring the issue. It could very easily be one of many match target or sniper rifles...

I think Bill will revise it thusly:

"The dude Hollis was with pulled out a gun and did some stuff with it.

He was also cute."

quote:

Originally posted by Memetic Engineer:

What is the alleged problem with "Remington Silvertips" anyway ?

This is actually a little complicated. if you have no firearms background, it may remain somewhat opaque. But I'll try.

The word cartridge is commonly used to denote a specific combination of bullet/bore diameter, case dimension, powder charge, and maximum working pressure. Cartridges are sometimes named after their inventors or developers. ".44 Remington Magnum", for example, means that Remington takes credit for developing this cartridge. Same goes for ".375 Holland & Holland Magnum", ".38 Smith & Wesson Special", and ".280 Remington".

Winchester is an ammunition company, like Remington. Both companies gleefully produce each other's named cartridges. Both companies will also gleefully produce rifles chambered for the other's named cartridges- if the public wants them. There's no reason not to. (Pressure and dimensional data is freely exchanged among these companies, at least it is post-development. It basically becomes public domain upon a new cartridge's release to to market, primarily because of do-it-yourself home reloading. Can't have Bubba blowing himself up because he had to *guess* a powder charge or overall length.)

What you're seeing on the Winchester site is Winchester's iteration of the .280 Remington hunting cartridge, the .280 Remington recipe, with their excellent and totally appropriate Winchester-patent Silvertip bullet as a physical part of it. But Remington have never made a Silvertip. To someone who knows this market, it just sounds awfully, jarringly wrong.

"Microsoft iPod".

Klar?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Mean Old Man,

As for thumbhole stocks, they've been around for at least half a century. Not often seen on production hunting rifles, but a fairly unremarkable custom addition to benchrest and precision long-range target rifles, more in the 1970s than any other era, I think. A company called Fajen has long been associated with aftermarket thumbhole stocks.

Chapter 76: "Bolt action, single shot."

In my mind, it was an old school, Camp Perry or Bisley-style, single-shot prone target rifle, in a wooden Fajen thumbhole stock. Not a pure target rifle action like an RPA or a Swing, because the ejection port is so small that the rapid-fire reloads our host depicts would be neither smooth nor easy. No, something like a Sportco 44 or a Remington 40-XB, a rigid-bottomed single shot with a loading/ejection port wide enough that one can just drop the cartridge into it.

My point is, the rifle sounded right. 40-XB with wooden thumbhole stock: