And here’s an F-117 carrying conventional non-stealthy LGB’s. Also shown is the faceted pylon that would carry all of these weapons.
Sep 162010
Sep 162010
WANT.
http://www.amazing1.com/burning-lasers.htm
Laser Gun – A prelude to a weapon of the future – the technology is here! Now Available – hand held, battery operated, 500 joules of pulse energy produce an intense burst of light capable of burning holes in most materials.
Input Voltage: 12VDC @ 1.5AMPS, 20-30sec. Charge Time Rod: 3 x 1/4″ Nd:GLASS With Integral Mirrors Output: 1-3 Joules @ 1.06 Microns Infra Red Storage Capacity: 270 Micro farads @ 2 KV Flash lamp Energy @ 1000 Volts: 135 Joules, @1500 Volts: 300 Joules Single Collimnating Lens 120 to 150 Shots From Internal AA Batteries Certified Class 4 Laser Product
Yay!!!! Handheld laser weapons that can do actual physical damage, and that you can buy! Yay, capitalism!
LAGUNSYS – Lab Assembled with Flashlamp, without Laser Rod (NDGL) ………………………………………$1949.95
NDGL – 3″ x 1/4″ Laser Rod Nd:Glass 6% doped with mirrored ends, full spec and brand new >1J …..$595.00
BOOOO!!!!! Damned capitalists!
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Seriously, the product is pretty neat, but still pretty far from a full-up phaser. It takes 20 to 30 seconds to charge up between shots, and each shot might hurt a person, but would hardly likely be fatal. Plus, the ergonomics suck:
It appears to have both fore and aft “pistol grips” that look like straight tubes. If someone goes to the bother of building one of these, I’d hope they’d go the extra step of ditching the “lab equipment” look and put it in a fiberglass phaser rifle housing or some such. And replace the battery pack in the weapon itself with a backpack full of batteries… or, better yet, something like a methanol fuel cell. Tens of thousands of shots, and if the power source is jacked up, a much faster charge time. Additional cooling systems would also likely to be required.
If an individual shot is powerful enough to take out a bird or small critter… holy crap. Varmint hunting has just gone to a whole new level. No windage, no gravity drop, no muzzle flash, and probably pretty quiet operation. Instead of getting one shot and then watching all the ducks fly off except the one you shot… now you get to plink away for minutes on end, with the ducks simply flopping over dead with a small smoking hole in their noggins.
Expect this to be banned momentarily.
Sep 122010
1994 NASA-Langley wind tunnel model photos of an F-117 packing two Joint Stand Off Weapons on external mounts. While these would almost certainly have provided a much bigger bang than the weapons shown yesterday, they would have been noticeably less stealthy… which would seem to defeat the purpose of using an F-117 in the first place.
Sep 112010
NASA-Langley photos of a wind tunnel model, circa 1994, showing an F-117 packing two stealthy, flat-bottomed missiles with stowed flip-out fins. Propulsion system unknown, although similar “conformal” missiles were shown repeatedly in the 1980’s with an inlet up front for a turbojet engine.
Sep 062010
After all the bitching about how Arizona’s law telling state police to enforce federal immigration laws is going to cause racial profiling… the United States Federal Government, in the forms of both ATF agents and sitting judges, have decided that American citizens had better racially profile… or face jail time:
Yes, yes, I know… “Inforwars” is not exactly the high water mark of non-crazy reporting. But the basic facts of the story seem to check out through other sources:
1) One Paul Copeland was a private citizen at an Austin, TX, gun show in Jan 2010
2) He was there selling a handfull of firearms. Which, as a US citizen, he’s perfectly within his rights to do without obtaining a FFL or any such nonsense.
3) A group of undercover ATF agents as well as Austin PD were at the gun show and observed a group of four Hispanic males. “The agents observed only one member of the group was speaking English, and that the men were avoiding the licensed gun dealers at the show. These observations led the agents to believe that the men might be illegal aliens.”
4) One of the Hispanics (“Aviles”) wanted one of Copelands guns. After the usual haggling, Aviles agreed to buy the gun.
5) Copeland asked to see Aviles identification.
6) Aviles refused to show it.
7) Another one of the group (“Huerta”) produced a seemingly valid Texas drivers license. Aviles gave the money to Huerta, who then bought the pistol from Copeland.
8 ) Huerta then gave the pistol to Aviles. Copeland saw this and objected that he had sold the pistol to Huerta.
9) The ATF agents saw this, and rightly noted that this is what’s known as a “straw purchase…” when someone who is legally notallowed to buy a gun gives the money to someone who is, who then buys it for the other person and gives it to them. This is a federal crime. The criminals here, however, are the straw *purchasers.*
10) The ATF agents stopped Aviles outside of the gun show and determined that he was an illegal alien.
11) The ATF agents then hassled Copeland, claiming he’d sold a firearm to an illegal alien. Copeland countered that he’d sold it to the guy with the apparently valid Texas drivers license.
12) The ATF confiscated all his weapons (the ones for sale as well as the one he was wearing) and let him leave.
13) On March 2, 2010, Copeland was indicted on charges of selling a firearm to an illegal alien, arrested on March 22. At trial, Huerta was brought in as a witness, admitted to being an illegal, admitted to the straw purchace… and was allowed to simply walk out of the courtroom. He has apparently not been arrested for his federal firearms crime *or* for being an illegal alien.
14) Copeland was convicted in federal court on July 20, 2010, and sentenced on August 27 to six months in a “work camp.”
Let me sum up: Copeland was arrested for selling a firearm to someone with a seemingly valid ID. He had no way to determine the legal status of Huerta, Aviles or anyone else. The ATF agents made a preliminary determination that the group of Hispanic males were worth watching as potential illegals because of the way they looked and spoke.
It seems to me that anyone who now wants to discriminate against Hispanics – or pretty much anyone, I suppose – now has a legal precedent for it: simply wave these news articles in the face of anyone who complains. According the the US FedGuv, American citizens will face arrest and conviction if they do business with anyone who *might* be an illegal.
The obvious joke here would be for someone to refuse to serve President Obama a hamburger because he *might* be an illegal.
Sep 052010
This is *beyond* sick and wrong:
ANY ITEM that looks like a gun will have to be licensed under several changes to the Weapons Act being considered by the Queensland State Government.
Even guns made out of materials as unlikely as soap or plastic may have to be kept under lock and key if they could “reasonably be taken to be a weapon”. …
Aug 262010
Gotta hand it to the gun-grabbers, this is actually fairly clever:
http://www.regulations.gov/search/Regs/home.html#documentDetail?R=0900006480b37fc2
Petition to the Environmental Protection Agency to Ban Lead Shot, Bullets, and Fishing Sinkers Under the Toxic Substances Control Act
It is of course akin to leaving “freedom of the press” intact but banning ink or paper.
Yes, there are non-lead options available for bullets and shot. But not being a reloader myself, I can’t claim to have ever actually heard of reloaders (who cast their own bullets) who reload with much of anything *but* lead.
I don’t know if this will get anywhere, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it does. If there’s one the the government – and that includes the EPA – loves, it’s to grow in scope, power and reach. And banning lead ammo would fill that need niceley: hundreds of millions of American citizens would be left with ammo that they’d get arrested for firing.
Aug 182010
You have no idea how much I want me one of these…
http://www.max-11.com/TopSecret.html
THIS ITEM IS NOT FOR SALE, DO NOT ASK TO BE PUT ON A WAITING LIST
Awww.
Aug 152010
Now under development for the Army is a modular suborbital/orbital launch vehicle known as MNMS (Multipurpose Nano Missile System). In its basic form, it will be composed of 24-inch diameter cylindrical rockets using pressure fed ethane/nitrous oxide engines. Stack two of these stages together, and a third, smaller stage and cluster six more stages around the first, and you can put 10 kilograms into orbit. At a vehicle cost of $1,000,000 it’s about the cheapest way to put something into orbit… but it works out to a hundred grand a kilo, ten times more expensive per kilo than the Space Shuttle. It can also use surplus ATACMS solid rocket boosters and surplus MLRS rockets.
A video of the concept can be seen here.
It can be used to lob small satellites into orbit, conventional munitions, experimental payladds, and almost certainly things like tactical hypersonic boost-glide recon bots.
Aug 072010
All you need is some money and a time machine.
The sad finale of the Navaho intercontinental cruise missile program: selling off the stuff. In this case, the massive launcher. One of the missiles was given to a local high school. My high school never had a strategic weapon… 🙁
