A modicum of fear-mongering to brighten your weekend

awesomeness, blather, Hmm..., news, Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, nukes, projects, science, science fiction, spacecraft, weapons 2 Responses »

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.

The Army printed a grenade launcher

awesomeness, Hmm..., news, politics, science, weapons 4 Responses »

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:

RAMBO’S Premiere

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.

And so, the Democrat war on the Moon begins…

AARRRGH, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., Meh., nukes, politics, rockets, science, science fiction, spacecraft, THIS is why Trump won, weapons, ಠ_ಠ 13 Responses »

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.

You guys like swarms of things, right?

aircraft, awesomeness, science, weapons, youtube 4 Responses »

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.

Yeah, but where’s the SteadiCam harness?

awesomeness, science fiction, weapons 3 Responses »

Jan 102017

HCG Exclusive M56 Smartgun

Yours for the low, low price of $1199.95.

It takes cancer to kill a SEAL

AARRRGH, Gah., history, news, weapons, ಠ_ಠ 2 Responses »

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.

YouTubers Worth Watching: Jeff Quitney

aircraft, awesomeness, history, nukes, rockets, science, ships, spacecraft, weapons, youtube, YouTubers worth watching 5 Responses »

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:

YouTubers worth watching: Forgotten Weapons

blather, history, weapons, youtube, YouTubers worth watching 7 Responses »

Dec 242016

There are a bunch of YouTube channels that I look at from time to time. I figured I might as well point them out… these channels will probably be of interest to a great many of the blog readers. Some are history, some aerospace, some humor, some politics.

First up: Forgotten Weapons. This channel is pretty much what it says on the box… videos are uploaded ever day or so that show some unusual and/or rare firearm. Often these videos are shot in an auction house where the firearm is soon to be sold, so, at least theoretically, if your pockets are deep enough you can end up owning them.

https://www.youtube.com/c/forgottenweapons/videos

Some recent videos include this one of the M134 minigun (which, contrary to popular opinion, you *could* legally own, you just can’t afford it… much less afford to feed the thing):

And this one of an entirely odd “chain gun” (the Guycot chain pistol) I bet you’ve never heard of… I sure hadn’t. It’s very, very clever: a double-action “semi automatic” pistol from the 1870s with a built-in 40-round capacity. The downside was that it fired a round that would have had a hard time taking down a rabbit. Sometimes cleverness isn’t enough. Sometimes you need brute force.

I got yer space gun right here

blather, history, Hmm..., spacecraft, weapons, youtube 4 Responses »

Dec 102016

A little over two weeks ago I linked to an old Army report on the idea of hand-held weapons for use in space. At *roughly* the same time the Army was pondering the need to kill Commie bastards on the moon, Winchester was looking at a shotgun that kinda was almost exactly what the Army wanted: the Liberator.

The Liberator was a short-lived idea for a four-barreled shotgun “Derringer.” It would be easy and cheap to manufacture, simple to operate, great for dropping into Viet Nam or Cuba or some place else with People We Like who are fighting People We Don’t Like. Shotguns are great for “bush” areas where the line of sight often isn’t that far, and where marksmanship training isn’t that great. DARPA was involved in pushing the idea.

Three Liberator models are shown in the video below. The Mk. 1 is just a wooden mockup, and was intended to use a four-round pre-assembled package of ammo… you put in the one chunk, fire it four time, pop the expended chunk out. The Mk. 2 used conventional shotgun shells and a simple break-open arrangement, like a greatly enlarged Derringer. The Mk. 2 is the design of interest here. It was made of magnesium castings; this would have made it strong and light and cheap, but I just can’t get past the idea of being creeped out about firing a weapon made out of *magnesium.* On Earth, with rough handling and humidity and such, you’d expect the magnesium might not hold up so well, and while it was undoubtedly an alloy of magnesium which was substantially less burny than pure magnesium… still, you wouldn’t want a scuffed-up shotgun to decide Now’s The Time and spark up in your hands.

But in space? Magnesium would be just fine in a vacuum.

Also of note: the Mk. 2 doesn’t have a standard trigger meant to be pulled by a single finger, but a squeeze bar for the whole hand. Just the thing for a Marine in a space suit. Additionally, note that the trigger guard actually folds up so if you have big fat gloves you can get a grip on the thing.

This does make me wonder. It was meant for low-end combatants who didn’t have anything better. Well, in the 1960’s, how often would that description have applied to anyone outside of the tropics? How often would someone need to handle this weapon while wearing mittens? It’s unlikely… but maybe, just maybe, the design features were put in with the thought that this could be used in space (NOTE: almost certainly not). The latching handle is *huge,* again just the thing for use with a spacesuit glove. DARPA could have been thinking about this for use in places just a little higher up than the hills of Cambodia.

Fostech Origin 12

art, awesomeness, weapons, youtube 5 Responses »

Dec 082016

Oh, my, yes indeedy. I’ll take three.

It helps that this suppressed semi-autoshotgun is being operated by a feller with an *extremely* fast trigger finger. With a thirty-round drum it also produced its own smoke cloud to hide behind.

Older Entries Newer Entries