From the Los Alamos National Lab website, a cutaway illustration of the Kiwi A nuclear rocket. This was not a design for an actual propulsion system to be used in space, but instead was a test engine. Eight Kiwis were built and tested.
Jan 192013
Jan 192013
In short: a Bulgarian man (Oktai Enimehmedov), jumped on stage where another Bulgarian, Ahmed Dogan, the leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, was giving a speech. Oktai put a gun to Ahmed’s head; Ahmed very quickly knocked Oktai’s hand away, and security very quickly jumped on Oktai. And *continued* to jump on him, kick, him, stomp him… in short, they beat the crap out of him.
The reason why I put “assassination” in quotes: the gun was a “gas pistol,” a non-lethal weapon that shoots tear gas or the like. However, at close range (the gun looked like it was about a foot from Ahmed’s head, for about a millisecond), lethal injuries could result. This might have been an actual assassination attempt, or it might have been some form of political theater, like a slightly more aggressive form of a pie-in-the-face.
[youtube sdjNV9nv3QQ]
You gotta love the old codger who comes up to the “assassin” near the end of the video and whacks him with his umbrella.
Jan 192013
I’m reconstructing the innards of the Project Orion pulse units for the “Nuclear Pulse Propulsion” book. The more interesting bits are of course still classified, but enough details have wandered into the public view that some educated guesswork can be applied.
Below is a *very* preliminary and incomplete reconstruction of the pulse unit for the 10-meter USAF design. The physics package is a hollow plutonium spherical shell surrounded by a uranium “pusher” shell, surrounded by a high explosive shell, with a uranium neutron reflector around that. That’s within a uranium “radiation case that, for a brief split second, helps redirect the X-Rays and neutrons into the channel filler material, which absorbed the radiation, violently explodes and vaporizes, ionizes and accelerates the tungsten propellant slab.
If the FBI wasn’t aware of this blog before… I bet they are now.
Jan 182013
(I coulda *swore* I posted this years ago, but I went looking for it and couldn’t find it. Either way, behold…)
The Lacroix Samouraï Urban Warfare (SUW) “High Impulse Weapon System” is sort of a shoulder-fired 76mm mortar. Normally that would not only knock you down, it’d rip your shoulder off, but the HIWS uses frictional damping to reduce felt recoil… the barrel and chamber slide aft 600 mm. The same energy is imparted to the shooter, but it’s spread out over time, giving the shooter a chance to absorb the recoil and remain standing.
The finned, unpowered projectile weighs about 3 pounds and can carry 0.65 pounds worth of explosive 300 to 400 meters downrange.
This video was from 2006 or so, and I haven’t heard anything about it since. It was developed a dozen years ago by Lacroix Defense & Security, and FN Herstal tried to market it in the US as the HIWS-76, but I’ve not heard anything since the 2006 demo.
[youtube 9nOkO8Sh2xs]
It should be akin in weapon potential to a similarly-sized recoilless rifle or rocket propelled grenade, but with no risk of back-blast. It would thus be safer to operate, as well as probably being somewhat stealthier (you launch a rocket, everybody with eyes can tell where it came from). You could use the HIWS from within a vehicle or structure (shooting through an open window, of course) without killing everyone in the room.Just the sort of thing for when the Judges are otherwise busy and Block War breaks out…
But the launcher itself is pretty heavy (17 or so pounds), and likely expensive. That would be its big problem… hard to economically compete against anti-tank rockets that are shoulder-fired from disposable fiberglass tubes.
Jan 182013
The Euthanasia Coaster
The Euthanasia Coaster is an art concept for a steel roller coaster designed to kill its passengers. In 2010, it was designed and made into a scale model by Julijonas Urbonas, a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London. Urbonas, who has worked at an amusement park, stated that the goal of his concept roller coaster is to take lives “with elegance and euphoria”. As for practical applications of his design, Urbonas mentioned “euthanasia” or “execution”. John Allen, who served as president of the Philadelphia Toboggan Company, inspired Urbonas with his description of the ideal roller coaster as one that “sends out 24 people and they all come back dead”. As a hypothetical means of euthanasia, the design led to concern from anti-euthanasia association Care Not Killing.
From the designers website:
Application:
Euthanasia, execution
Dimensions:
Height: 510 m
Drop lenght: 500 m
Track length: 7544 m
Duration:
Lift: 120 s
Drop: 10 s
Exposure to 10 g: 60 s
Total: 3:20
Features:
Max speed: 100m/s
Inversions: 7
Max g-force: 10 g
Cause of death:
Cerebral hypoxia, lack of oxygen supply to the brain.
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Oddly enough, the designer doesn’t seem to be a German, as you might expect.
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Jan 182013
Raedthinn:
Jan 182013
Well, nobody local.
Man raises questions after carrying rifle into JC Penney
Short form: a guy does his shopping in a Riverdale, Utah, JC Penney with a pistol on his hip, an AR-15 on his back. Some people are disturbed, but nobody freaks out and calls the cops; the business doesn’t boot him out.
But then there’re the commenters on Fark, many of whom *do* freak out. A damned fine thread title, though…
Jan 182013
“The Glitch”
[youtube 8Q2P4LjuVA8]
Jan 172013
It’s not the best quality, but this diagram of the FDL-8X (soon to be the X-24B) might be of some interest:
Jan 172013
Suggest that not all kids need or even should have a high school education, and instead should get a job, and people will get all snippy.
And then there’re the Chinese.
[youtube Vo9WHi-bvrM]
Industriousness, even when under a fascist system like China, will trump decadence.