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
 Posted by at 1:09 pm
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.

2014-05-18 nuke pano 07asmall

 Posted by at 9:38 pm
Jun 012014
 

Gun range granted liquor licence [sic], time to get the shots in

This is actually a pretty neat idea. The Wilshire Gun Range in Oklahoma City has an attached cafe, and now can legally sell booze. Why isn’t this a bad idea? Because if you buy booze, they scan your drivers license and you are not allowed onto the gun range for the rest of the day. So… you can go there, grab lunch, do some shooting, get a beer and be on your way.

Note the traditional British-media fearmongering at the end of the article. Booga booga, skeery guns!

 Posted by at 10:34 am
May 142014
 

And really soon, too… next week. No point in waiting, I suppose.

As previously mentioned, I’m putting together a book titled something like “A Guide to American Nuclear Explosive Devices.” It will include accurate diagrams of American nuclear bombs, RVs and warheads, along with pertinent information for each design. I’ve made a pretty good dent in the basic layout drawings, but there is more research to be done.

In order to get this done, there are a few places I need to visit. One of them is the National Museum of Nuclear Science & Industry in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s about an 11 hour drive from here, so  it’d be the better part of a work week to get down there, photograph *everything* (with scale references) and then get back. With gas, motels, cat boarding and the like, it’d be a fair chunk of change, but it also seems a pretty invaluable resource.

Sort of along the way is the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos. A smaller museum, but it looks pretty good as far as nukes. I am also interested in any suggestions for things to see – nuclear, military, aerospace, geological – between Thatcher, Utah, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

So,  in order to pull this off, I’m looking for funding. In the grand tradition of Kickstarter and the like, I’m using three funding levels:

$10 “Warm Glow”: You get a thank you email and a warm sense of accomplishment.

$50 “Going Ballistic”: I send you a DVD (or 2, or 3, or everything transferred via Dropbox or some such) with every single nuke-relevant photo I take on the trip.

$100 “BLAMMO”: You get the DVD & a prototype edition version of the book, which won’t be otherwise available (I’m looking at 11X17 with old-school pressboard covers, like the BoMi, Dyna Soar & BWB booklets I recently made briefly available). The final book, whether self-published by me or – who knows – by an actual publisher, will almost certainly be formatted much smaller.

So if you want a whole bunch of photos of nuclear weapons and a book of large-format detailed and accurate drawings of American nuclear weapons, or if you just want to help out… now’s your chance. This opportunity will be open for the next week or so.

 

—-
Here is a somewhat older image, showing a number of the nuclear weapons I’ve drawn up (more since then):

nukes3

And here are some images showing roughly what you’ll see in the 11X17 prototype of the book: multiple views of each device in large scale, with a crude mockup of what the data page will look like for each device. It will have unique charts showing the physical effects – overpressure, thermal radiation, cratering, etc. – for each device.

Nuclear warheads nukes-Model

 Posted by at 6:21 pm
May 092014
 

“Pershing Joins the Ranks”

Note that at 1:09, a Pershing missile is dropped from the bomb bay of a B-52 and the motor fired. I was previously unaware of this test. Anybody know anything about it? It seems odd that a USAF bomber would be used to test a US Army missile.

If it worked as well as it seemed to, I have to wonder what, if any, consideration was given to arming USAF aircraft with Pershing missiles. Not a concept  can recall hearing of before.

b-52-pershing It

 

 Posted by at 10:43 am
May 082014
 

A British air-to-surface missile fired from the MQ-9 Reaper UAV. When the warhead doesn’t go off, it’s *kinda* capable of targeting a single person. When I say “kinda” I don’t mean that it might miss… I mean that it will indeed take out that one person, but you don’t want to be sitting next to him. I shudder to imagine the *mess* if one of these were to take out an individual…

splat

It’s “dual mode” in that it has both Semi-Active Laser and Active mmW radar seekers.

[youtube P8ZOf8xp1no]

 

 

 

 Posted by at 9:40 am
May 022014
 

Because Nobody Demanded It, here is a to-scale representation of the DC-1 SSTO with the MOL, the Zenith Star laser testbed and the operational SBL.

mol-zs-dc1-2 mol-zs-dc1-1

This is, of course, in support of my proposed book on the Strategic Defense Initiative. It would include:

Launch systems: Delta Clipper; Millenium Express; Platypus; Zenith Star Launch System; Barbarian; Shuttle-C; NASP

Space-Based weapons: Zenith Star; operational Space Based Laser; Neutral Particle Beam; Saggitar Railgun; X-Ray Laser; Brilliant Pebbles; Space Cruiser

Terrestrial systems: F-15-ASAT; HEDI; ERINT; land-mobile MX; air-mobile MX; Midgetman/HML; Airborne Laser

I *know* I’ve missed a few. Feel free to fill in the blanks.

 Posted by at 3:22 pm
Apr 262014
 

If you’re gonna do it, overdo it. For example, here’s what an operational anti-missile Space Based Laser might’ve looked like, compared to the Zenith Star experimental laser and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory. Kinda bignormous, with a 50-foot diameter primary mirror. Details on this are shockingly lean, with the model put together using two tiny diagrams and one poorly reproduced bit of artwork… and they don’t agree with each other on everything. So a lot of this is guesswork. It’s not even close to done, but I thought some of y’all might be interested. The “tail end” of the operational SBL has what I’m assuming is an SP-100 nuclear reactor for running non-laser systems. The laser itself would be chemical, not nuclear, with around 80 shots worth of fuel.

MOL-ZS 5

 Posted by at 12:49 pm