Putting together the 3D CAD model of a General Electric has been complex but straightforward… but hammering the 2D diagrams made from it into shape has proven a bit challenging. Most of the 2D work is done in an ancient version of AutoCAD, but there was something about the diagram (created in Rhino 3D) that caused ACAD to either lock up or crash. So finalizing the diagram has been done in Rhino, which means the diagrams will look a little different.
But is it in the 40 watt range?
In short: it’s a laser that focuses a nanosecond pulse in front of a target to cause the air to superheat into a ball of plasma and go BANG, at 130 decibels. So far the ranges tested have been short; development is needed to given the system useful range of 100 meters.
Expect to see this used not so much by the military, but by militarized police forces looking for a way to knock protestors off their feet.
First up:
An SM-2 Block III missile went BLAMMO just after launch, setting a fire on the ship.
Well, that’s embarrassing. But then the Russian Navy (Navy Day in Sevastopol) is not to be outdone:
Looks like the solid rocket boosters for an SS-N-14 “Silex” torpedo-carrying missile broke away just a little early.
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:
