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Indeed. The user later gets permission and community participation for future series of questions and identifies them as such: https://space.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1498/any-oppo... https://space.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1746/60th-ann...

Jon Skeet?

https://stackoverflow.com/users/jon-skeet

> The gun was fixed to the station in such a way that the only way to aim would have been to change the orientation of the entire station.

Are these stations easier to maneuver than I imagine? Sounds like someone was imagining age of sail type of combat.

Russian paranoia at its finest

Henry Repeating Arms (apparently no relation to the original designer of the lever action) still makes the AR-7[0]. As near as I can tell it was designed for this purpose, but never actually issued to USAF aircrews. There are a handful of other USAF aircrew survival weapons linked from there.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArmaLite_AR-7

They already had a makarov pistol with them from the start. They made this custom short barrel double shotgun with a third rifle barrel.

This was to fend off wild life and maybe hunting while waiting for the recovery team to get to them if they came down far from the designated recovery zone.

Source?

Over the years at least 7 soviet missions landed off-target including Yuri Gagarin.

And not like 100-500 meters off target, but 200-600 kilometers. Having a gun in such cases make perfect sense.

feels like you just invented this lie on the spot

Surely a chemical/biological solution would have been easier, cheaper, lighter, and less likely to fail.

I imagine you can't take turns easily once there's a hole in the ship.

On the other hand, there are legitimate predators that will hunt and eat humans in Siberia. One team encountered wolves that they had trouble fending off, so they upgraded the pistol to a more formidable shotgun/rifle combo.

Yeah thats why you invent small 2 barrel shotgun with big ammo and carry it all the way into space, while even small makarov pistol would fulfill that role

26 fatalities due to bear attacks this year: https://tass.ru/obschestvo/28211259 https://eia.media/ru/article/society/6aa937759a7947f75201876... https://www.rbc.ru/society/15/09/2026/6aa937759a7947f7520187... This year bear encounters made headlines in Russia, but the number of fatalities isn't unusual. Records is 80/year in 1985, 1986 and 1996. Brown bears don't see us as food as long as there is some other food available. If food is scarce this year (some random dude on the internet says that there were an early thaw followed by freeze in 2024 that cause pine cone yield in 2026 to fail) they might attack. Either out of desperation or when encountered over a food source (i. e. garbage dump) and mistakes a human for a competitor.

You might be underestimating how remote some Soviet capsules landed. If they overshot their landing site they might be alone in the wilderness for days until rescue teams arrived

"Kosmonaut survives space mission, gets mauled by bear protecting her cub" is not a great headline. Bringing gun was relatively cheap insurance

Brown bears attack people in Russia quite frequently [1].

[1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2026/09/11/russia-has-a-bear-pr...

I think it's important not to overgeneralize with something that might potentially kill you. The brown bears in Japan can be deadly. A 380 kg and 2.7-m-tall brown bear, which twice attacked the village of Tomamae, killing 7 people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ussuri_brown_bear#Interactions...

There was a brown (North American Grizzly) predation attack on Nov 2. It’s rare, but not unheard of.

Wolf predation attacks on humans are rare, but far more common than brown bear attacks.

Landing in remote part of Siberia is not a typical situation and many typical assumptions do not apply.

If you’re a pilot or cosmonaut in Siberia, you might not have come down as planned and might be there for a while. An injured, possibly bleeding human could be easy prey. They also have tigers…

"Generally" implies there are exceptions. Would hate to be unprepared.

What about lunar bears or Saturn bears? Those seem to be heavily armed.

https://youtu.be/pvjgIxuVdo4?is=7sF64RM0qTNqJguw

"generally". A hungry bear or wolf might be tempted to mess with an injured cosmonaut.

It's never excessive to carry a gun.

> I learned not to trust Know Your Meme when it asks me to turn off my adblocker

Now why on Earth would you comply with that request?!

> Two, I learned not to trust Know Your Meme when it asks me to turn off my adblocker!

don't you know that correct way is to treat any "turn off your adblocker" notification as another ad?

We could also say it's about a 15 minute run for a healthy person

Since there is no atmosphere even a bit further.

I'd like to hear more about the alternate reality in which this ballistics exchange is taking place

There are a few guns that exist that could achieve the necessary velocity (just shy of 4,000 mph) but they’re not handheld. But yes, it would be possible for the right gun to fire a bullet that went around the moon and hit you in the back of the head.

All grenades have a casing the "fragments" when they go off, but some use thicker, heavier, scored metal casings to maximize the anti-personel effects of the resulting shrapnel. If you don't want shrapnel, then you make the casing light and arrange for it to break into fewer pieces. So grenades designed to produce more, heavier, sharper fragments are called fragmentation grenades.

Probably was both. NASA got a COTS component for their seismologic experiment, saving some time/budget on R&D, and military got to have a grenade launcher tested on the Moon, providing data for whatever "future warfare" programs they were surely running back then.

I think these days we call this "synergy"?

It’s not you’re just fooled but garbage people with false bravado.

On reddit there was a ton of censorship.

I dislike censorship in general. Someone else decides whether I may read comment xyz from another human being (assuming it is a human being). I don't want censor-in-the-middle people, be it on HN or reddit. Old reddit was easier to use than HN though; on HN we get time-locked as well as jokes-eliminated. That forces a more serious tone. I do not think it really improves the signal to noise ratio though; usually it means that there are fewer comments in general, including potentially interesting comments. I mean, if HN were serious about joke-censorship, any funny story shared by someone else on HN, even if historically accurate, would also have to be censored. After all you can not evaluate whether a claimed story to be true, to NOT be a "joke in disguise". I could go on and on here, but at the end of the day it just boils down as to whether people like censorship or not. You may reason that you prefer it, to "pre-filter away content you never want to read", such as a joke, but for me, I just dislike that someone else sits in the driver seat and tells me what I am allowed to read and what not. I want to decide on that on my own and I have no issue with "noise ratio"; I don't read all comments anyway, simply due to lack of time. I can only glimpse at some of them. Do you really have the time to go through all comments on each entry on HN?

Yet, Reddit is alive and SE is... "struggling". Good jokes also carry information, that's why they work.

I think there’s a distinct difference between a community collectively deprecating something, versus individual members of a community deciding what will and will not be deleted. The first means the comments just fall away, while the second (and a statement of “we will delete your content it is not welcome here”) is actively off-putting not only to those who post that sort of content but others passing by who may be put off posting anything in case they unknowingly “break the rules”.

At least here it's jokes, sometimes they ask people to put valuable comments inside the chat, which is of course not publicly accessible so it's lost