Oh, boy! We’re doooooomed!
A quadrotor equipped with a handgun, apparently built by an 18-year-old Connecticutter for a college class. It has the expected groups all in a tizzy.
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In the actual history of surface-to-air missile development in the US, we had a number of Nike missiles… Nike-Ajax, Nike-Hercules and in the end, the Nike-Zeus (which was redeveloped into the Spartan). After that, the Nike naming convention came to an end. Cities were no longer ringed with anti-aircraft missiles.
But in the Pax Orionis world, the US remains substantially paranoid about *every* form of threat, so we’d have several new types of land-based city-defending anti-aircraft missiles. But after Nike-Zeus, what might they be called? “Zeus” would seem to be the end of the Greek Deity line. So… what? Nike-Hades? Nike-Kronos? Nike-Achilles? Nike-Typhon? Nike-Hermes, perhaps?
Suggestions/discussion appreciated.
After all the talk of “Boston Strong,” it seems that if someone dressed in bog-standard punk attire shows up, it’s time to freak out.
Some guy was wearing a belt that looked like a belt of rifle cartridges (appears from the photo to actually be a belt of ammo), some idiots panicked and called the cops, the cops showed up, examined the belt, recognized it for what it was…and arrested him anyway. He was charged with “unlawful possession of ammunition, unlawfully carrying a dangerous weapon and disorderly conduct,” but the charges were later dropped.
Unless the “punk” in question was acting like a jackass (certainly possible, but no indication of that is given in the article), all the blame for this falls on the side of the panicked idjits and the cops who arrested a guy for his fashion choice. Even if the belt of ammo was a belt of live ammo, you know what’s missing from this story? A *gun.* Where’s the M-60 machine gun that would be required to actually make the ammo go “bang?” According to THIS, “the passengers were in a panic, fearing that the suspect was about to pull out a weapon.” Where, exactly, did these brave Bostonian geniuses think he was going to pull out a 30-pound, four-foot-long machine gun *from?*
And how the hell can it be unlawful for a 26-year-old to possess ammunition?
Avast amount of work was put into space-based weaponry during the SDI days, but the bulk of that work has remained tucked behind security classification. Artwork was released publicly from time to time, but with rare exceptions that artwork was pretty clearly either not based on actual engineering design work, or was stripped of important features.
In all my digging I’ve found a grand total of *one* illustration of a space based railgun that I’m fairly confident represents a serious design effort. Sadly dimensions were lacking… but the design included a nuclear reactor and radiator system was was very likely an SP-100. While the SP-100 system itself appears to have been in constant flux, scaling the whole assembly from the size of the radiators leads to something I’d estimate accurate in scale within +/- 15%.
For a future USSP release, I decided to include this railgun as I included the Zenith Star laser in issue #1. The easiest way to make good 2D diagrams for something this complex is to make a 3D CAD model based on the sketch, including the SP-100. I didn’t know how big the railgun was supposed to be; I didn’t try to scale it until I had it largely put together with the SP-100 in place. And boy, is it *not* small:
The shuttle is of course to scale.
Several details lead me to think that this General Electric concept is on the up-and-up:
1) It includes the SP-100. This was often (not always) left off of images for public consumption.
2) It includes *very* large planar array radar for targeting warheads thousands of kilometers away, something I’ve *never* seen elsewhere, but which is pretty obviously important.
3) It has a fairly substantial, though unclear, storage for LOX and LH2 hidden behind a thermal shield/radiator. Note: the nuclear reactor was to keep the system running for years while awaiting The Day, and for running systems like computers and radar and such. But the power needed for the railgun was vastly more than the SP-100 could provide; the LOX/LH2 would run a turbogenerator to crank out the megawatts needed to make the gun go bang.
4) It doesn’t look “sci-fi cool” so much as it looks like a “great big thing built in space.”
Launching this monster would have been a hell of a chore. Presumably it would go up in pieces atop an ALS booster, and there assembled by a human crew launched via shuttle.
Here’s a novel way to destroy a main battle tank. Apparently filmed in Putin-occupied Crimea.
This makes for some interesting reading and analysis:
A blog reader provided this scan. It comes from the archive of the Imperial War Museum, and was all alone in its folder… what you see is all there is. It appears to show a rocket powered “rammer,” with a massive armored nose for slamming into enemy bombers. The pilot is provided with an easy-bailout ramp, presumably to be used after aiming his plane at a target but before impact (I would *not* want to be in at thing when the actual ramming occurs). Presumably dates to WWII. The style of drawing looks like a patent drawing. My guess is that it was a patent submitted by Just Some Schmoe during the war, and is not a serious concept by a reputable design firm, but I don’t know for sure. If anyone has firm data, please advise.
Science fiction media is filled with representations of laser weapons hitting living targets. But since we don’t actually know what an event like that would look like, the effects folks have to imagine the results. And they are all over the place. Sometimes the laser cuts the the victim like a hot knife through butter. Sometimes it just leaves a scorched entry wound. Sometimes the entry wound explodes. Sometimes the entire victim explodes. Sometimes the victim is vaporized.
Part of the reason why we don’t know what a laser-weapon-strike would look like is because we simply don’t have meaningful laser weapons. Things like the “blasters” from Star Wars or the “phasers” from Star Trek are *probably* in the hundreds of megawatts to gigawatt range in power output; and while such lasers exist, they are the size of buildings and have firing times measurable in nanoseconds, often enough. And besides, even if someone could set up a series of experiments where some government-funded gigawatt laser was used to blast targets just to see what would happen, somebody would get all snotty if living targets were used. Shocking, I know, but even though our prisons are full of rapists and murderers and jihadis and televangelists and Illinois politicians and the like, Hollywood for some reason can’t park ’em in front of a laser cannon and flip the switch to “on.”
Bah.
So, the best we can do, for the moment, is subscale experimentation. It’s not perfect by any stretch; no matter how powerful your laser, if the pulse is really, really short, the actual depth of penetration into a target is going to be extremely limited. The first outer layer gets blasted off and turned to gas; if enough power is dumped into that gas it’ll turn incandescent, and will absorb all further incoming laser radiation. A laser cutting right through a human body almost instantly is almost certainly Not Gonna Happen. Even if the laser could somehow punch straight through, all that flesh and blood would be instantly converted to gas. So if you had a hole five millimeters wide by, say, eight inches long suddenly poked through your torso, the flesh and blood that *used* to be there will *explode.* You’d be blown apart, an effect that Hollywood can certainly reproduce, but that might jack up the MPAA rating.
So here we have some extremely high-speed, good quality video showing numerous laser strikes on droplets of black ink. The droplets are *vastly* smaller than your average human victim of a dastardly alien space pirate attack, but there might be something to learn here for those looking to film just such a scene. Or, it can just be some really cool video of lasers blowing up ink droplets. Don’t need to overthink everything, I suppose.
Oy. Here we go…
Summary:
Firearm Risk Protection Act of 2015
Amends the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act to: (1) prohibit the purchase or sale of a firearm unless the purchaser presents proof to the seller and the seller verifies that the purchaser is covered by a qualified liability insurance policy, and (2) require any person who purchases a firearm on or after this Act’s effective date to be covered by such a policy. Exempts the purchase or sale of a firearm for use by a federal, state, or local agency.
Defines “qualified liability insurance policy” to mean a policy that: (1) provides liability insurance covering the purchaser specifically for losses resulting from use of the firearm while it is owned by the purchaser, and (2) is issued by an insurer licensed or authorized to provide the coverage by the state in which the purchaser resides.
From the text of the bill:
“(2) In paragraph (1), the term ‘qualified liability insurance policy’ means, with respect to the purchaser of a firearm, a policy that—
“(A) provides liability insurance covering the purchaser specifically for losses resulting from use of the firearm while it is owned by the purchaser; and
“(B) is issued by an insurer licensed or authorized to provide the coverage by the State insurance regulatory authority for the State in which the purchaser resides.”.
(b) Penalty.—Section 924 of such title is amended by adding at the end the following:
“(q) Whoever violates section 922(aa) shall be fined not more than $10,000.”.
And the inevitable and obligatory:
“(B) Subparagraph (A) shall not apply to the purchase or sale of a firearm for the use of the United States or any department or agency of the United States, or any State or any department, agency, or political subdivision of a State.
So, which is this more? A way to make firearms ownership too expensive for poor people? A way to enrich politically active insurance providers? A simple way to increase the number of people in the US who suddenly switch from “law abiding” to “criminal,” thus justifying an increase in the police state?
Here, this will shock you, I’m sure. A list of those sponsoring this bill:
Rep. Maloney, Carolyn B. [D-NY-12]
Rep. Lynch, Stephen F. [D-MA-8]*
Rep. Tsongas, Niki [D-MA-3]*
Rep. Grijalva, Raul M. [D-AZ-3]*
Rep. Clark, Katherine M. [D-MA-5]*
Darn those evil Republicans, doing their corporate masters bidding to soak the little guy!
