A high energy laser mounted on a helicopter shoots a target in groundbreaking test
Giggity!
No real details about the power or capabilities of the laser weapon. Chemical laser? Free electron? LED diode? Dunno, though the cables that run from the chopper to the laser pod seem to be fairly sizable. Certainly not capable of anti-armor operations; no such thing as a portable laser that is. Almost certainly poorly capable of taking out missiles and the like… a helicopter is a shaky platform for that sort of thing. But for setting individual jackasses on fire? Torching small buildings, piles of ammunition, IEDs, light vehicles? Burning the gunners girfriends name into the roof of the Mosul Piggy Wiggly? This might be just the thing.
Yeah, well, you try coming up with a clever headline for this…
Reportedly the armor on this T-72 was badly trashed after whacking into a light pole. Which does not seem to be a good advertisement for the T-72, honestly. Note also that the tank commander nearly got his noggin lopped off by the power lines.
Whoopsie.
Pretty sure someone’s gonna catch some hell – both from the base commander and from everyone back at the barracks – for this little screwup. There was a time when someone could make an embarrassing blunder in an eastern European totalitarian Soviet dictatorship and have a hope of covering it up… but now, the T-72 got swarmed with millenials taking cell phone snapshots. Heh.
The far left went buggo under Bush, but has gone truly insane under Trump. With calls for violence against “Nazis,” and redefining “Nazi” to mean anyone not on the far Left, it was only a matter of time before people like the fascists in Antifa and similar groups decided to step it up from simply assaulting people in the street to gunning people down. Well, here we are.
The shooter in this case was a dedicated Bernie Sanders supporter and vehemently anti-Trumper.
And because in this era of social media Everything Must Be About Me, I found these quotes especially interesting:
I met him on the Bernie trail in Iowa, worked with him in the Quad Cities area.”
Orear described Hodgkinson as a “quiet guy” who was “very mellow, very reserved” when they stayed overnight at a Sanders’s supporter home in Rock Island, Ill., after canvassing for the senator.
Yup. Home town area. Joy.
Remember during the 2008 campaign when Jared Joughner shot and injured a Democratic Representative (and *killed* a republican judge, but never mind him), the Dems and the media went through the roof blaming it on Sarah Palin and her supposed rhetoric? it’ll be interesting to see if they do the same here. In fact, I kinda expect they will: in 2008, they blamed Republicans for violence against a Dem. Now, I expect they’ll *still* blame Republicans (specifically Trump, I’ll bet) for this violence. But even if they don’t blame Republicans specifically, they are already trotting out the “blame the inanimate object” argument. As an example, here’s the Democrat governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, informing the public that ninety-three MILLION Americans are gunned down EVERY DAY:
An interesting note: the BernieBro opened fire with a rifle (I’ve not seen a description, but probably safe to assume it’s an AR-15) and fired *many* rounds… and yet, killed nobody. He was a *terrible* shot. These socialist whackos might think they’re going to start a new civil war but, man, I don’t think it’d turn out well for ’em.
With the rise of rapid prototyping, the prospect of easy home-made pistols of some reasonable quality is rising. However, it has always seemed to me that the hardest part of making a decent pistol was making a rifled barrel. Most of the home-made pistols you’re likey to see tend to be smooth bore for the simple fact that that’s a whole lot easier than rifled. But as it turns out, rifling a pistol barrel seems to be a lot easier than you might suspect. This guy shows how to go about making a simple rifled barrel using nothing much more than a cheap drill press, a Dremel tool and a hydraulic car jack. Couple a barrel like this with the easy-to-manufacture parts of the rest of a pistol, and making guns at home becomes something virtually any amateur can do. And, perhaps, something any amateur *should* do, especially in uncivilized places where such things are legally frowned upon.
If you want better, cleaner rifling, more complex machines can be made. Even so, this should be well within the capability of a decent machinist.
These are two wholly different manufacturing methods to create the same thing. Both are, int he grand scheme of things, quite simple and straightforward. Certainly simpler than laws that pretend to ban firearms.
If I had five minutes, a modest camera and a tape measure, I could get the images and measurements I need off the MOAB on display outside the USAF Armaments Museum near Eglin AFB in Florida. Sadly, I’d also need to be *at* the museum, and that’s not likely to occur anytime soon. So… is anyone in the area, or going to be in the near future, and willing to take some photo-measurements?
A clever solution to the age-old problem of how to make a fully automatic crossbow. Obviously external power (in the form of a cordless drill) is needed; the device is perhaps more of a slingshot than a crossbow since it uses rubber bands rather than a steel bow. Still, one can see how a true full auto crossbow capable of penetrating the armor of those pesky invading Mongols or Turks can be devised using this system as a basis.
What would be unrealistically spiffy: a system where each crossbow bolt had its own built-in battery or capacitor. Each bolt in turn would completely discharge its power supply into the crossbow; that power would be used to operate the mechanics. This way, the full weight of the battery needed to operate the system would not need to be carried at all times; the weight of the battery would form part of the weight of the bolt itself. But this might lead to excessively expensive bolts. And of course a true replaceable box magazine would be a good addition.
Plus, one can never get tired of the true supervillain laughter of a man who takes joy and pride in the construction of fully automatic deadly weapons that manage to circumvent the laws of his native Germany.
The Magnus Effect is lift generated by a rotating sphere/cylinder/cone/spindle/whatever while in forward motion. Spin a spanwise cylinder properly, the relative airspeed over the top of the “wing” will be higher than under the “bottom,” with the consequent lift that would be expected from womens and gender studies basic aeronautics. People have been looking at building aircraft using rotating cylinders for the wings for over a century now; and while the idea is interesting, the weight and complexity, coupled with drag and other issues, have over-ridden any perceived advantages. Still, as this video showing the considerable efforts a guy went to to make an RC airplane using spinning Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets for wings shows, *if* you can make a functional Magnus Effect aircraft, you might be able to perform some interesting maneuvers. And possibly even intentionally
And because why not, here’s another Magnus Effect video. But this one… welll… it seems a tad lacking in the “wisdom” department, but definite winner in the “hold my beer and watch this” department.
If there was ever a demonstration of the combination of “technical genius” with “wartime desperation,” it was the Bachem Natter from late in World War II. This German design was a point defense interceptor, from a time when B-17’s, B-24’s and Lancasters freely roamed the sky, laying waste to the German infrastructure. The Natter was a rocket-powered, vertical takeoff, partially reusable manned surface-to-air missile. It was to be armed with a multitude of unguided explosive-tipped rockets in the nose, probably to be launched as a single salvo. Reportedly, someone had the bright idea that the pilot would then aim his plane at another bomber for a ramming attack, bailing out at the last second. But since bailing out meant separating the nose from just forward of the cockpit aft bulkhead, the likelihood is vanishingly low that either the pilot would survive or that the Natter would continue forward in a predictable path. The more reasonable approach would still be for the pilot to bail out, but for both the pilot and the aircraft to pop chute and land safe enough to be recovered and reused.
The Natter was launched unmanned a few times and manned once, killing the pilot. It was *kind* of a neat idea, but the execution was not so good. The Germans would have been better advised to have worked on unmanned surface to air missiles than the Natter. But for all the claims of vaunted German efficiency, the Nazi regime was astonishingly inefficient, with many redundant and non-communicative programs.
Just as well, in retrospect.
There are many photos and illustrations of the Natter out there, but I figured these diagrams might be of interest.
