Star Fleet Weaponry
Will such weapons cause the sandpeople to revert back to their Tusken raiding days?
Seriously, this could be an encouraging development (that is, if we can keep certain people from selling the technology to the sandpeople or the Chicomms in order to raise campaign contributions).
This matter is worth a careful eye.
Forget ‘Directed Energy’ weapons they are too expensive and draw huge power requirements. They are also working on ‘Kinetic Energy’ weapons. One project is nicknamed ‘Rods from God’ and is described thusly:
“A pair of satellites orbiting several hundred miles above the Earth would serve as a weapons system. One functions as the targeting and communications platform while the other carries numerous tungsten rods--up to 20 feet in length and a foot in diameter--that it can drop on targets with less than 15 minutes’ notice.
The guided rods enter the atmosphere, protected by a thermal coating, traveling at 36,000 feet per second--comparable to the speed of a meteor. The result: complete devastation of the target, even if it’s buried deep underground.” - Every bit as effective as a large nuclear warhead without the subsequent radioactive fallout. Hitting say an underground Iranian base would basically leave a huge crater miles across!
Posted by MJS
01/12/2006 at 08:27 AM
If they’re just getting around to announcing this, there is a good probability that this has already been tested and is now fully operational. The proverbial “Bolt from the Blue”.
Just in time to serve as an “antidote” to iranian and noko nuke “research”. Maybe the sand-apes would see this impact as a “message” from allah, to tell them to start acting like civilized people, and not barbaric neanderthals. Nothing like a good old-fashioned asteroid impact (either natural, or manmade) to cause an immediate attitude adjustment on their part.
Kinetic energy is a matter of mass multiplied by velocity squared, I have no idea what approximately fifteen cubic feet of searing hot tungsten would weigh, but with that travelling at at 36,000 FPS (squared) that would be 15*X (x being the unit mass of tungsten) * approximately 1.3 Billion (V^2).
Or in round terms, about twenty billion (tungsten cubic foot units of mass) worth of KE to be released in a very short inverval of time.
Or, in more plain and basic terms, one helluva big hole is gonna get punched into the ground, somewhere, sometime…
Directed energy in space is much more appropriate for taking out missiles, warheads, etc, than zapping targets on the ground. In the 80s this was called “star wars”. Today, it’s just a damned good idea…
Sounds like good old American ingenuity at work here! “Rods from God” outstanding idea, and no nasty radiation fallout! If I was a mad mullah in Tehran I would be getting nervous about now. (especially as the Europeans are about to issue a “strongly worded statement") Yeah that will scare them guys.......
The space laser sounds clever, with a mega watt output it should be effective but I doubt it would work in the atmosphere. Most likely it is for use against targets in orbit.
Apparently, we don’t have to do it to them, they are perfectly capable of doing it to themselves, As in “Hajj’ Stampedes:
http://news.yahoo.com/fc/world/religion
We have shopping-crazed hordes of stampeding barbarians at Wal-Mart, they have religion-crazed hordes of barbarians in mecca…
Remember folks who they will blame all of this on. JOOOOOOish Science!
Directed energy weapons sound cool, but all we really need is bombs and bullets and the guts to use them on the bad guys.
Great observations, RP, Macker and Badger.
I wonder if the legendary virgins await those cretins who managed to get stomped by their own comrades? Hard for even the Teheran Troglodytes to blame THAT on the evil infidel, what? And it certainly can’t harm the infidel....
In Inside Asia (1942), John Gunther noted that the most popular man in the Middle East was “probably Adolf Hitler,” for obvious reasons. It is no accident that the Islamic extremists and their claque of supporters sound more like a Nuremberg rally with every passing day.
You hit the nail on the head, Badger, and the key is guts. To be more succinct, courage, clear-sightedness, convictions, and common sense.
I fear that all are in short supply nowadays. I only pray to be proven wrong.
I would think that this would be a wecome addition to the arsenal of American military might. Anyone that trys to launch a nuke would see it blown from the sky just about or at the point of launch. Kind of an expensive lesson in who’s your daddy.
I wonder if the legendary virgins await those cretins who managed to get stomped by their own comrades? Hard for even the Teheran Troglodytes to blame THAT on the evil infidel, what? And it certainly can’t harm the infidel....
My bet Tann is the evil jooos and filthy infidels will still get the blame somehow. In court here today the hook handed peice of crap Abu Hamza was shown in a video telling “the faithful” how living in Britain was akin to living in a toilet. Yet he has been happy to “suffer” living in Britain since 1979 on welfare with his family spouting hatred to anyone who will listen.
OCM,
The Cain and Able analogy is misdirected. This situation is more like Able, seeing Cain coming with rock in hand, picked up a stick and whacked HIM upside the head!
01/12/2006 at 10:03 AM
