That’s the future! What a fascinating modern age we live in.
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Jul 032014
Jun 232014
Tonight TNT premiered their new feel-good series of the summer, “The Last Ship.” The idea of the show: “Babylon 5: Crusade” set on the open seas rather than deep space. A genetically tinkered plague has swept the planet, infecting at least 80% of humanity with a 100% fatal disease, and one US Navy ship seems to have missed it all by being way up in the arctic when it all went down. During the course of the first episode, the ship is on its way to a refueling station on the coast of France when a Mysterious Foe launches a nuclear missile in their general direction. The missile misses the ship, passing – from the looks of a computer map – some fifty to a hundred miles to the side of the ship and detonating well beyond it (I think it also took out the refueling station). That was rather odd. But what rustled my jimmies was as soon as the nuke went off, the electromagnetic pulse wiped out all the electrical systems on the ship. There are at least three things wrong with that.
1) A naval vessel is almost by definition a floating metal box. This means that it pretty much is a large Faraday cage. An electromagnetic pulse should have little impact on a naval vessel.
2) The military has been spooked by EMP for *decades.* I’m pretty sure that military ships would thus use hardened systems, so that even if the ship doesn’t make a good Faraday cage, the systems should be able to shrug off an EMP.
3) The nuke went off in the lower atmosphere. Thus… NO Meaningful EMP. A truly damaging electromagnetic pulse is created not just by a nuke going off, but a nuke going off IN SPACE. The short form: the high energy gamma rays from the bomb strike the rarified air in the upper atmosphere and rip the electrons off in what’s known as the Compton Effect. The electrons then blast downwards and create powerful electrical currents. The downward trajectory is shaped by Earths magnetic field, so it’s not a simple circular area under the bomb.
For bombs set off in the lower atmosphere, there is again an EMP as the gamma rays interact with the air. But here the effect is right next to the bomb, since the air is right next to the bomb, and within the nuclear fireball. The fireball itself effectively absorbs much of the EMP. If the bomb goes off near long conductors such as train tracks or power lines, the effect can be to set up a kilo-amp electrical pulse which will race down the conductor for many, many miles wreaking havoc as it goes… but other than that, unless you are close enough to the bomb to actually be damaged by the bomb, EMP is not a meaningful concern.
In short: what “The Last Ship” should have shown was a bright flash off on the horizon and the crew going about their duties largely unaffected by electrical weirdness. I imagine the radar and communications guys would have seen some strange things, but other than that, the ship should have shrugged it off.
And to add “buh?” to “WTF,” after the French refueling place was taken off the menu, the US Navy ship sidled up next to an Italian cruise ship and siphoned off their fuel. It was ok, because everyone on the ship was dead of the plague… but since we just saw a US Navy warship get electrically trashed by an EMP, why did the cruise ship still have all its lights on?
And as an aside: if the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans, PETA, French or whoever set off a nuke over the US and create a damaging EMP, chances are good that if your electronic hardware isn’t plugged into the wall, it’ll be fine. The electrical current that goes zipping by sets up powerful induction along long conductors (again, train tracks, power lines, phone lines and the like) which can trash things connected to them. Expect to lose transformers and anything plugged in that doesn’t have a military-grade surge protector. But independent non-plugged-in electronics, from cameras to phones to laptops and automobiles and such are too small for the field to create much of a charge. Jetliners – which are designed to and regularly do survive lightning strikes – should be just fine, though the airports themselves might short out. Satellites should largely be fine, unless they are close to the bomb when it goes off or share it’s orbital altitude or lower. Anything beyond the Van Allen belts will probably be quite unaffected.
Jun 222014
Police: Robbery suspect loses ‘bet’ that victim doesn’t have a gun
The man began to walk away, when , police say, he turned around and said “I bet you don’t have one of these”, pointing a gun in his direction.
The guest did have “one of these,” and began firing at the suspect. He reportedly hit the man at least once.
From the relevant Fark thread comes the best of all possible responses:
And to save time… there are around a quarter million (low estimates, 80 k; high estimates, several million) incidents of defensive gun use in the US per year. Most don’t actually involve pulling the trigger, never mind capping the bad guy.
Jun 132014
Sixteen silent minutes of March/April 1946 US Army footage showing some of the “atomic shadows” to be found near ground zero in Hiroshima. When the bomb went off, targets close enough were flash-fried by incredibly intense light; paint was very often burnt. But if there was something between the bomb flash and the surface, the surface would be “shadowed,” with the result that the part of the surface that did not see the flash did not get burned. In some cases the resulting shadows are incredibly distinct (in particular painted surfaces, where there is a substantial difference in brightness between raw and scorched paint), in other cases the shadows are more difficult to see (such as on concrete or stone).
At just before 10 minutes, you see an example where the shadowing object was a seated human.
[youtube sHF5y-lI2jw]
This phenomenon has been employed in scifi movies and TV shows from time to time. but they very often get things backwards… as in “Iron Man 3,” where some humans cast shadows on buildings due to very powerful explosions. But it’s the shadows themselves that are scorched black, not the surrounding area… which doesn’t make sense.
Jun 102014
Some interesting footage of the B-36, especially showing the retractable defensive turrets with twin 20mm cannon.
[youtube bK7KvhjQx9k]
Jun 102014
General Hans Kammler was a high ranking bureaucrat in the Nazi regime, in charge of developing the death camps and, by the end of the war, in charge of production of the V-2 rocket and jet engines. At the end of the war, he vanished, reported having killed himself rather than be captured. One of a whole lot of Nazi scumbags who simply disappeared under a mountain of corpses.
But over the years, Kammler has been kinda like the Elvis of Nazis: he keeps being reported to have survived the war, having escaped to Antarctica, or escaped to South America or having escaped on an alien flying saucer or a time machine, whatever the inventor of the tale thinks will make him a buck. Well, huzzah, there’s a new one:
Did US fake top Nazi’s WWII suicide and spirit him away to get hands on Hitler’s secret weapons programme?
The idea here is that the US quietly took Kammler to the US to help with rocket programs and the like. And it’s of course true that the US did bring a whole lot of German scientists and engineers and their data to the US for the purpose of aiding with American research programs. But there is a massive problem with this hypothesis for Kammler: He would have been useless.
Kammler was a civil engineer. That’s why he designed death camps… at its heart, a large camp (“death” or otherwise) is a matter for people who know how to build buildings and transportation infrastructure and the like. But the US had no need for death camps, nor the expertise on how to make them. The US was *loaded* with civil engineers. We didn’t need more. What we need were weapons designers… aeronautical and mechanical engineers, physicists, chemists.
(As we said back in my college days, aerospace engineers make weapons. Civil engineers make targets.)
During his stint running the V-2 and turbojet programs, he was in charge of seeing to it that production of these complex devices that required unusual alloys was successfully carried out. But here again, it would have been a useless skill in the US. If there was anything the US was good at in 1945, it was building things in large numbers at high quality on a budget. Scrounging for rare alloys? Just buy ’em. Rounding up slave labor? Not an issue.
Kammler probably didn’t know a damn thing about what made the weapons work or the physics behind them; nor did he need to. That wasn’t his job. And the job he did do… the US didn’t need.
So while I suppose it’s possible that the US took Kammler, there would have simply been no point in it. Those we took in Project Paperclip we were quite open about. Von Braun and his team were plastered all over the pages of Life and Time. If Kammler made it to the US, he can probably be found in a shallow grave somewhere in the Texas desert with a 0.45 inch diameter hole in the center of his forehead, buried shortly after arrival when they figured out just what a useless tool he was.
Jun 082014
A propainfotainment film from 1963 describing the development of the Minuteman ICBM.
[youtube WmSUoVJ1im0]
Point of note: 1963 is 51 years ago. With all the advances in the last half century, America still relies on the Minuteman. Since the Minuteman was developed, we also developed the Midgetman and Peacekeeper ICBMs… and got rid of them.
Also of historic note: when the Minuteman was developed, a lot of components that, were they to be developed today, would be digital were then analog. The safe-and-arm for the solid rocket motors was essentially a heavy chunk of clockwork. The S&A simply served the purpose of making sure than an accidental electrical or mechanical discharge somewhere, if it inadvertantly set off the ordnance lines leading to the motor igniter, would not actually get to the igniter. They are simple mechanical blocks that prevent the signal from getting through unless they are properly activated.
The Minuteman S&A’s worked well enough. So, when Thiokol was developing the solid rocket boosters for the Shuttle, they used the Minuteman S&As. And since once something is designed and fielded at NASA it almost never changes, the 1963-vintage S&As stayed with the RSRMs throughout the lifespan of the Shuttle. Last I knew, they were also in use on the five-segment boosters to be used on the “next generation” Space Launch System.” So *if* the SLS gets built (doubtful) and flies for decades (doubtful), the relatively ancient Minuteman S&As will probably fly with them throughout the SLS’s lifespan. If SLS flies in 2020 and lasts 20 years, the Minuteman S&A will have an 80 year operational life. Of course, by the time the SLS is retired, the Minuteman ICBM itself might still be in service.
Jun 032014
Just about done with the basic drawings for these two…
Jun 022014
Weapons and mass shootings
The Washington Post has an article on the firearms used in mass shootings from 1984 to today. Included is a graphic showing an artsy representation of them all. There are some interesting conclusions to draw:
- 22 shotguns, 23 revolvers, 29 rifles and 77 semiauto pistols have been used by mass murderers. That’s 151 guns over a span of about 30 years… in a nation with something like 300 *million* firearms. That’s one gun out of about 2 million firearms are misused in this fashion.
- A whole lot of the killers were nuts (hardly a surprise there)
- The annual death toll from mass shootings varies massively from year to year, with 2012 being the worst in recent years… but it’s still a statistically miniscule count (about 70 dead in 2012)
- “Almost 65 percent of the killers were white, which is comparable to their share of the population. More than 16 percent of the killers were black, slightly higher than their 12 percent share of the popualation.” This plays hell with the popular media story that mass shootings are a white thing, especially when spouted by ideologically driven yammering blowhards
Jun 012014
Panoramic view of the M65 cannon and prime movers on display at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This cannon, of which 20 were made circa 1953, fired the 15 kiloton 280mm W9 shell. Almost as soon as the cannon was fielded, though, it was rendered obsolete by battlefield nuclear rockets and nukes capable of being carried by small strike aircraft.
