My mum used to work on a mobile library.

You're out in the sticks though aren't you?

I'm behind the sofa.

Can you dig out the spare change and missing lighters for me while you're there?

I remember reading about this merging with "Demo Man" but can't recall anything. I'm not a fan of the half-brother bit but am even less keen on the Demo-Man thing. I quite liked MOTU 200x which shows his face being burned off. I've managed to get ahold of the entire series and have just started rewatching. Been through the first four episodes now.

They had enough going on with Randor's links to past battles I thought. I do like the way the reboot handles it's own history.

The Demo-Man Classics figure's laughable. My Classics Skeletor is pure win however

I never got to have action figures when I was a kid so no He-Man/Thundercats/Turtles toys for me.

One of my neighbours had the whole lot of He-Man figures back in the day and one of my relatives had everything including the castle and snake mountain! Mega-jealous.

I tortured my parents, I was on a MOTU figure a week at one point

To this day I'm fascinated by those figures and sets, the styling is just something else. I had Grayskull but I was never that fussed on it somehow, I always wanted the 'scarier' sets like the Horde and Slime Pit ones. Other than that I had the utterly crap Battle Bones that held the figures, in theory...

That tracer bullets glow because of friction with the air, not because there's something burning in them.

Tracer ammunition (tracers) are bullets that are built with a small pyrotechnic charge in their base. Ignited by the burning powder, the pyrotechnic composition burns very brightly, making the projectile visible to the naked eye. This enables the shooter to follow the bullet trajectory in order to make aiming corrections.



... no, there's something burning in them

Is there perhaps potential for there to be two different sorts of tracer bullets; one that works by friction and one by pyrotechnics?

The only thing that strikes me is having enough friction on the bullet to make it glow is going to slow it down quite a lot which will mean it takes a different trajectory to the regular bullets thus defeating their purpose...

Indeed. Friction reduces velocity and reducing velocity is very bad for a bullet for all sorts of reasons. As you say, slower bullets drop more due to gravity, so they have a shorter range. They can also be deflected in flight more easily. Plus bullets are actually all about the kinetic energy they dump into the target on impact, and (as we all remember from our science lessons I'm sure) e=1/2mv^2, so reductions in velocity make a big difference to bullet effectiveness.

I suppose the alternative would be to package the bullet with some sort of highly fluorescent chemical, maybe a binary chemical with a barrier that's cracked by the initial acceleration of the round out of the barrel.

However, at the end of the day, the way we do it now works. Bullets are in fact pretty dumb things - if you think about it, they're just very efficiently thrown rocks - so making massively complicated things out of them is kind of arse-backwards. If you're going o put a load of effort into developing a replacement for the entirely adequate tracer round we already have, you might as well put the effort into making them guideable or even into designing actually useful caseless ammo, which everyone thinks is a good idea but nobody seems to be able to get right.

No according to Mythbusters there isn't. Friction causes a (I think they said) phosphorus coating to glow.

Mythbusters be wrong yo

Linky?