Coming in June to Japan: this $12 “Blade Runner” water pistol:
【展示会情報】アルゴ舎さんは、あの高木式ブラスターガンをまさかの水鉄砲化！？その名も爆水拳銃。これでこの夏は未来型ウォーターバトルが楽しめそうです。 pic.twitter.com/SzeB36nxAO
— 豆魚雷 (@mamegyorai_jp) April 18, 2017
Apr 192017
Apr 132017
Explosives are, in a way, like rocket engines: they reached a certain plateau in performance decades ago and haven’t really gotten much better. This is not due to relevant people and organizations not caring to develop new ones; the problem is that there are just so many ways you can stick unstable molecules together in a cost effective manner. Some years ago while working ordnance systems (shaped charges for stage separation, rocket motor initiators, etc.) news came down that a new explosive (Octanitrocubane) was being studied. A *more* powerful explosive. Yay! Then the details came out: it was a *few* percent more powerful than HMX (the current gold standard in high explosive, and it has been since the ’40’s) and was expected to cost more than gold even after the manufacturing processes were worked out. Bah.
But there’s hope of new explodey-sauce:
Ground state structure of high-energy-density polymeric carbon monoxide
Links only to an abstract. But there’s a description HERE. Short form: at least theoretically, if you compress carbon monoxide, and compress it a lot, it seems it’ll form a polymer. It’ll turn into a solid. A solid that should remain a solid when the pressure lets off. But also… a solid with a whole lot of pent-up anger issues:
the team’s search found that the most stable cabon monoxide structure at ambient pressure and temperature would be a polymer, a repeating molecule with a backbone of carbon and oxygen rings called Pna21. But this stuff couldn’t form spontaneously—it needs to be made at high pressures, maybe around ten thousand times higher than sea level pressure. And unlike other carbon monoxide polymers discovered previously, Pna21 would be absolutely explosive, five to ten times more so than the same amount of TNT, thanks to the huge amount of energy it stores.
Five to ten times as explosive as TNT would be damned handy in an explosive. TNT is the standard; HMX has a “relative effectiveness factor” of 1.7. Octanitrocubane is the best at 2.38. But if polymerized carbon monoxide has an R.E. factor of five… that’s about three times better than HMX. Since HMX is what’s used to squeeze plutonium pits to make go “bang,” doing three times better would lead to the potential for smaller, lighter nukes.
Of course, this all depends on whether carbon monoxide really does form a metastable solid explosive at high pressure, and is stable enough to be safe. An explosive that goes off if it rises above, say, fifteen degrees kelvin is less than entirely practical.
Mar 202017
An article in dire need of an editor describing a 60 kilowatt laser system meant to destroy small targets such as drones.
The Army Will Finally Be Able To Blast Drones With Lasers Soon
Behold:
Hopefully, days in which the U.S. Army shoots down drones with $3 million Patriot missiles will come to an eventually end when the service starts using a 60-kilowatt laser system in a few months.
…
And, of course, the Army wouldn’t shooting down drones with something that costs enough to buy a mansion.
The short form: a single shot from a solid state laser system such as this would cost about a dollar. Anti-aircraft guns shoot rounds costing perhaps dozens to hundreds of dollars per round. Missiles cost hundreds of thousands to millions each.
Mar 192017
Mini-nukes and mosquito-like robot weapons being primed for future warfare
Most of the article deal with the threat of nanotechnological weapons. I’m personally not terribly concerned about them… in theory they’re nightmares, but in practicality the chances of a mechanism the size of a bacteria functioning for very long in the wild is low. “Nano-scale” metal is extremely fine dust… dust that will oxidize almost instantly in an oxygen environment. Dust that has such a vast surface area to volume ratio that thermal control would be virtually impossible.
I suspect it’d be possible to design nanites that will function in specific environments. But The “gray goo” threat seems to me unlikely.
The headline contains a reference to something else that interests me more than nanites: “mini nukes.” But here again, the description seems more sci-fi than practical:
Nanotechnology opens up the possibility to manufacture mini-nuke components so small that they are difficult to screen and detect. Furthermore, the weapon (capable of an explosion equivalent to about 100 tons of TNT) could be compact enough to fit into a pocket or purse and weigh about 5 pounds and destroy large buildings or be combined to do greater damage to an area.
“When we talk about making conventional nuclear weapons, they are difficult to make,” he said. “Making a mini-nuke would be difficult but in some respects not as difficult as a full-blown nuclear weapon.”
Del Monte explained that the mini-nuke weapon is activated when the nanoscale laser triggers a small thermonuclear fusion bomb using a tritium-deuterium fuel. Their size makes them difficult to screen, detect and also there’s “essentially no fallout” associated with them.
The description seems to be a miniaturized version of an inertial confinement fusion system… lasers causing a pellet of fusion fuel to implode. So far in order to get a pellet the size of a grain of sand to fuse has required a laser system the size of a warehouse; compressing all that down to the size of a briefcase seems… optimistic.
Still, *IF* that compression becomes possible, then these mini-nukes need to be put into production *now.* Not just for the military potential… but more importantly because they would finally make Orion propulsion clean and reasonably cheap.
What causes fear among the author and subjects of this article would cause great joy among people able to envision a wider view.
Mar 102017
RAMBO’S Premiere
RAMBO (Rapid Additively Manufactured Ballistics Ordnance) is a 40mm grenade launcher built *almost* entirely from 3d-printed metal parts. Looks like this:
On the one hand… meh. A grenade launcher is a relatively low-performance device, certainly compared to the 1911 that was 3d printed a few years ago. The level of precision and the pressures involved are less than for a standard firearm.
On the other hand… it’s only been a few years since the idea of actually printing a metal object, never mind a firearm, was pure sci-fi.
Even the ammunition was 3d printed. the launcher was fired 15 times, with no signs of damage or degradation.
The barrel and receiver took about 70 hours to print and required around five hours of post-process machining.
The printing and post-processing time may well exceed the time needed to conventionally machine the same p[arts, but in time this will improve. And it *may* be less labor intensive… instead of someone marshaling a chunk of metal through the CNC milling process, the printer *may* require no more than to enter the data, hit “print,” then step out for a couple dozen beers. If the printer system can be reduced in size, increased in speed and reliability, and properly packaged, I can see the Army putting these printers into small standard shipping containers along with an appropriate generator. The containers could be transported to bases near the combat zone to print out weapons on demand. This might be a few decades off before it’s truly practical, but then it might be shipped to our boys fighting on the beaches of the Belgian Caliphate in only a few years. Hard to predict.
What’s not hard to predict: that some people will promptly lose their mind at the idea of firearms that can be manufactured without the need for a factory… or for a federal registry. And so, from this article on the subject we get:
You might also worry that this technology could find its way into the wrong hands. It was scary enough when libertarian gun nuts were printing one-shot pistols in their garages. Imagine a wannabe terrorist 3-printing a damn grenade launcher in his basement.
Oooh, scary libertarians with guns!
The advantage of 3d printing firearms is in rapidly stamping out new designs. But if your goal isn’t to try out something new, but rather to just get something that works… a terrorist has a whole lot of far cheaper options available.
Mar 012017
If you’ve been wondering how the party of fear-mongering and authoritarianism was going to respond to the idea of private American companies going to space and the moon, I believe we have us an early test balloon:
Congressional candidate: Moon-colonizing companies could destroy cities by dropping rocks
One “Brianna Wu” scientifically embarrasses herself, but likely improves her standing with the Luddites, by claiming that “Rocks dropped from there have power of 100s of nuclear bombs.”
Now, on one hand this is true. If you fling a big enough rock from the surface of the moon, it could hit the Earth with kinetic energy similar to the total energy of a nuke. But there’s the thing: in order to do that, you need to *impart* damn near a nukes worth of kinetic energy in the first place. Simply chucking a rock from the lunar surface at lunar escape velocity (about 2.4 km/sec) will not put that rock on a trajectory to the Earths surface, but rather just in a very wide orbit , basically the same orbit the moon has. You’d need to cancel out the orbital velocity, another kilometer or so per second. From there the rock would “fall” to Earth, picking up speed and smacking down with no more than Earth escape velocity, or no more than 11.2 km/sec. So, by accelerating a rock to about 3.5 km/sec, you get it to hit the Earth at about 11 km/sec.
Sounds great for a weapons system. At 11 km/sec, the kinetic energy of one kilogram of rock (or anything) is 60.5 megajoules. One single kiloton of yield is defined as 4.184 terajoules. So to get a kiloton of bang out of a lunar rock, you’d need to launch (4.184 terajoules/60.5 megajoules) 69,157 kilos of rock. Lobbing a seventy-metric ton rock to 3.5 kilometers per second is a non-trivial act. Plus, you have to assure that the rock not only hits the target via accurate guidance, but survives passage through the atmosphere.
But Wu didn’t just say that a rock would have the power of a nuke, but “hundreds” of them. So… let’s say 100 times Fat Man, or 1.5 megatons. That would require the launch not of 70 metric tones, but 105,000 metric tons. The USS Nimitz displaces about 100,000 metric tons. So according to Ms. Wu, the threat posed by the likes of Elon Musk is that he will toss aircraft carriers off the surface of the moon.
Ms. Wu then went on to claim that any criticism of her rather unrealistic fearmongering was due to sexism, and to then decry the militarization of space. Because apparently a few tourists going around the moon will be able to grab chunks of moonrock the size of a carrier battle group and hurl it at Earth.
Silly as her fears are, I won;t be the least bit surprised if they gain traction, and this is used as the basis of an attempt to shut down private spaceflight in the US… or at least to nationalize it “for the children.”
Thanks to blog reader SE Jones for heads-up on this miserable little story.
As always, feel free to check my math.
Jan 112017
U.S. Navy F/A-18 Hornets released a swarm of 103 Perdix semi-autonomous drones in flight.
The Perdix drone is an itty-bitty thing with only 20 minutes duration, but it seems to be capable of some interesting things when released as a semi-autonomous swarm. The swarm of drones starts off as a line, but they end up orbiting a single target at a radius of about 100 meters. Beyond the direct military applications of data gathering, this sort of thing would likely be *seriously* disturbing to enemy forces. The end of the video is shot from that central point as a hundred screaming things circle it like a school of hungry piranha-banshee.
Jan 102017
Jan 042017
And so 2017 gets off to an interest start in the effort to wipe out celebrities…
“Future Weapons” Star and SEAL “Mack” Machowicz Dies at 51
“Future Weapons” was a good and missed show. Only ran for three seasons (2006-2008) which now puts in squarely in the past. It would be nice to see an updated version of the series, though of course it now cannot have Mack as the host.
Jan 032017
This YouTube channel is not a producer of content, but an aggregator of vintage documentaries. Additionally, the videos have improved audio and stabilized video – i.e., they’re better to watch and listen to than the originals. The videos are *all* over the place… you’re as likely to see one on nuclear bomb testing as you are on household cleansers. But there are a *lot* of videos that should be of considerable interest to readers of this blog. Lots of military and NASA vids.
Jeff Quitney
Here the page is broken down into convenient playlists.
Some recent videos of interest: