pluto77189yea been reading abt all these exotic crystal lasers. considering its superiority i wonder why they concentrated on chemical lasers in the first place?
multiple lasers that output to one point and then get focused into one beam remind me of the Death Star.
Actually, the BIG part of the R&D is the guidance, tracking & killing of the target. Chemical lasers are here, and they WORK. The Chemical reactions provide for the output. A solid state laser needs more pure energy from electricity. SS lasers are here, and they work, but they are not yet as powerful as chemical lasers.
The Army IS using SS lasers in IRaq. They have a mobile, medium energy laser, mounted in a humvee, I think. It’s based on industrial lasers used for cutting metal. They have been using it to destroy IED’s and weapons that were confiscated—from a distance. It’s supposedly the safest way to destroy old artillery shells and homemade bombs. You don’t have to get enar the thing. They can fire the thing a thousand times a day.
It’s there, and it works, but it’s only good for a few hundred yards, and takes a few seconds to burn through metal. you’d want something much bigger for a fast moving target.
I did some quick math. Lases diodes are pretty small–the ones I work witha re about a half cm square or less. Let’s say a higher power one will be a fum cm squared. a half meter square cube can hold 2,500 diodes on each face. Leaving one face clean for the beam output, that gives us a total of 12,500 laser diodes. Typical construction lasers output 5 milliwatts of coherent light, once the beam passes through the optics. They can do twice that with the same diodes, but regulations limit them to under 5. Most of these 5 mW lasers have diodes rated at 10mW or more–some are 20-30mW doides. We’ll assume the same power loss for corrective focusing optics as in a regular laser, without output restrictions. Basically, something you could build with “off the shelf” laser diodes.
12,500 20+ mW laser diodes, each having an effective(what’s coming out the final optic) output of 10mW. This equals 125,000 mW. Convert to Watts, and you have a 125W laser, with simple, everyday, available to the public, laser diodes. You could start a fire with that.
There are diodes “available” that output orders of magnitude above 10mW.
The “problem” was not getting the power, a few thousand diodes give that to you. The problem is getting all these laser beams to converge into one single beam. The use of these crystals seems to ive a simple way of converging the light.
pluto77189That airborne laser stuff doesn’t even work in the YAL-1 yet, which is as big as a warehouse. Nowhere near an application in a tactical aircraft.
THEL, which very recently shot down another missile during live-fire tests, is the only working laser gun avaiable and weights 80 metric tons and is as big as four boxcars.
They will not be using a chemical laser for fighter sized aircraft. Curently, the military is funding research and development of high energy solid state lasers. These lasers use the same principal as the original ruby quartz laser, using simply electricity and optics, negating the need for the bulky and dangerous chemical fuels, and their equally nasty exhaust by-products.
These lasers are being developed, tested and refined. And they actually work. I haven’t heard in nearly a year about these things, and when I did, they thought they were only a few months away from producing the power output the military wanted for prototypes.
The thing works like this:
You take hundreds or thousands of high power infra red laser diodes(like the things in a CD player, but on steroids). These are then fastened(pointing inwards) to a garnet crystal cube, on all but one face. When power is supplied to all these diodes, they all output into the garnet. The optical properties of the crystal cause all the light to output the single, clean face of the cube, in a powerful, square beam. Some VERY high intensity beams have been achieved already. Seems the main problem is not getting it to output more power. That’s a siple task now that the tech actually works.
What they’re having trouble with is cooling the crystals, which will crack when used multiple times. A neat possible solution is to create a weapon with many crystal assemblies, that rotate into position before firing. Essentially a laser gattling gun.
pluto77189Robots in Disguise
Name – Aircraft Type
Ramjet – F-15 Eagle fuselage with delta-wings and canards (vertical tails mid-mounted on main wings)
Actually, I had wondered about Ramjet for a while, when I was a kid. Up until that point, all the aircraft were modeled after ACTUAL aircraft, so it seemed out of place…until I read up on some cold-war relics… Remember the XB-70, the Mach 3 bomber? Well Ramjet was its interceptor counterpart, the F-108 Rapier. don’t think it ever got past the mock-up stage, but it was supposed to do a mach 3+ dash, and fire 3 falcon nuke air to air missles are the hordes of soviet bombers coming over the pole…
Check this out…
http://www.acig.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2080
pluto77189A better question is, how long before the USAF makes actual Transformers?
Have you seen video of the X-35 transitioning from forward flight to hover? It’s pretty darn close.
pluto77189Total Annihilation. THAT was a fun game. Supposedly, The Creator of it, Chris Taylor, is making a follow up. That’ll be great. Probably the most intense RTS I’ve ever played, if not the most realistic…giant robots…
I would love to sit and play some RTS again–simply the best most satisfying games ever. But I can’t play them unless I can get invloved, playing a several hour long fight. I don’t have that kind of time to kill anymore.
Maybe if TA2 comes out, I’ll find a way.
Too bad there’s no really good modern, 3D, RTS games around, using modern equipment.
pluto77189I think it was at least accpeted by the higher officers.
And don´t give me that “they probably were in a fight just before …. ” They were working a prison guards – period. I doubt these US soldiers did see real combat for weeks or months. For me thsi is typical REM behavior – play cool with your prisoners so that you have something cool to show when you get home. .
There is NO doubt that some of the reason behind this was because of the FACT that these guys were trying to kill Americans. ThAT fact makes it very esy for idiots to justify such disgusting acts. You are both missing my point–I’m trying to give an insight to the reasons, NOT to justify it.
It’s like a trophy, of some sorts. Some people posed with Iraqis, holding up signs saying “Thank you Lt.smith!”, Some posed holding up signs saying “LT. Smith killed my Dad!”(Not sure if that was proven to be a hoax or not, there were several GOOD photos circulating, all with different messages). Some posed with pictures of Iraqi prisoners being put in humilitaing poses.
There are going to be a$$HOLES in the military–I know one or two.
MOST don’t do this sort of stuff, Very few of them do. However, just like anything else, only the new is reported, and NOT commiting horrible and cruel acts of humiliation of prisoners is not news, but pictures of the humiliation IS news. And it is embarassing to me, to the military, and I’m SURE it’s embarassing to the President, who RELIES on the image of the US military to help his cause. So much so, he’s going on Arab TV today.
We’re hoping to give the Arab world a good impression with the conduct of the forces in Iraq. I doubt ANYTHING could have hurt that more than those jackasses that did this to the prisoners. Even if they didn’t hurt them, but simply took pictures of them, for whatever reason, they should have known that it WOULD LOOK REALLY BAD TO MUSLIMS. for that, they should all be punished as if they deliberatly tried to undermine the operation, for that is percisely what they did.
I just want to smack that stupid girl with the t-shirt and the cigarette…little bi**h…
pluto77189Not to mention, how many average Americans would know what an exocet is, let alone the difference between them?
I know…Assumption of ignorance has lead to many hollywood twisting of facts…
independence day: Wil Smith says of a STUPID-looking missle launcher “like the AMRAAM launchpad on ‘da stealth”–just to make it sound like he knows what he’s talking about. Insults my intelligence.
The F-18’s would make sense, since they were marines, and Marines fly mainly F-18’s and Harriers.
However, there were more aircraft in Independence day than just F-18’s. You can clearly see on the ground F-14’s, and in the Air are Harriers and F-14’s. Although they never appear in the actual battles, just on the ground and in the “trip to the fight ” scenes.
Also, the use of Air-to air missles baffles me. Why not bombs? Or the Harpoons they used on godzilla??
pluto77189what are you on about? you implied that the reason that those soilders were mistreating the prisioners were because they just caught them with an AK47 after a gun battle. thats plainly wrong. these soilders were prison gaurds who most likely never saw real combat, never mind having just narrowly escaped a bullet fired by one of those captives.
how did the rest of your post in aby way backed up your claim that those were just soilders venting anger after a firefight? :rolleyes: they must have been pretty angery to have such large grins across their faces. 😡
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Probably because they’re in a war, and have just got done shooting dozens of people to death, and managed to capture some people that were trying to kill them. They probably never thought the pictures would be circulated, and did something incredibly stupid.
It’s no doubt happening quite often in Iraq. There are bound to be SOME a$$holes in ANY group of several hundred thousand people, military or not.
My friend that recently came back told us of some of the things he saw–not pretty. They never did anything like this to the prisoners, but treatment they gave the people that were trying to kill them was far from pleasant.
The 82nd and the british troops were repsected by the Iraqis, because they took no crap from anybody, and were VERY hard, but not malicious, like THESE idiots.
Being hard or heavy handed in a WAR is one thing, but simply degrading someone–no matter WHAT they did, nor even if they DESERVED to be treated as such–is not acceptable. It’s a black eye on the military, the country and the PURPOSE. Not to mention that the ALREADY biased Arab news networks wll have a field day with the REAL images…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>…
The prison guards were NOT the only ones doing this! Some acutal soldiers were too. The prison guards know these guys were shooting up their friends, so I’m sure htey have almost as much animosity for them too. They don’t have to have been shot at PERSONALLY to feel just as much anger.
Besides, I never justified it, I clearly stated it wasn’t right in the second part.
pluto77189“Probably because they’re in a war, and have just got done shooting dozens of people to death, and managed to capture some people that were trying to kill them. They probably never thought the pictures would be circulated, and did something incredibly stupid. ”
as i recall, those pics were taken in a prison, and the soilders in the pictures were prison gaurds, not combat troops.
even if someone did shot at u, it didnt make it right to abuse and humiliate them that way! how would u feel if the american soilder that was taken captive was striped naked and made to w**k in public?
If there’s OONE thing I hate, it’s when someone quotes PART of a message. Why would you ask me that, when I answered that in the second part of the original post?
This stuff goes on, it always will, and it’s FAR more common that these pictures alone–remember, only the STUPID ones took pictures.
The mistakes the few make in the military reflects on the entire military, and the military reflects on America. Damn right they better put a stop to this.
pluto77189BTW, I have also seen the unedited footage (or at least the longest version that is widely available) and it seems like nothing but a sniping murder from a distance to me. You can flame me for that but you won’t change my opinion, at least not until new facts might come.
I asked some people who returned from Iraq about the video, and all of them said it was pretty much a given that anyone out at night was up to no good. The people knew that the insurgents were planting bombs at night, and the US was being very observant. So, even IF there was No way for them to be absolutly sure they DID NOT HAVE AN AA missle, you have to keep in mind the situation: This is a war. These guys were walking around in the street in the middle of the night during a war, doing “something”, carrying “something” around, in the dark. In a warzone, the innocent people must understand that a military force will not hesitate to shoot if they have the slightest possible inkling of danger. IF these guys were not up to no good, they should have known better. The Apache crew would have failed if they did not react to the percieved threat, since they were in a WAR.
The percieved simplicity of modern combat, the “video game’ look, has made people think that war is equally as simple. A few decades ago, this situation would have happened similarly, but due to the technbology, they would have been strafed, or bombed, without the detailed video image. This is what war is, and it sucks. someone is doing something suspicious, they die. IF you hesitate, it could be you. This is not a pollice action.
War is SO unbelivably horrendous. My friend, while he was still in Iraq, called a few times and told us about what was going on. He was still in a war mentality, and mentioned that they killed many people. He didn’t brag, but he was not holding back. When he returned, and people were not shooting at him, he couldn’t talk about lots of stuff. Horrible things, having to shoot and kill women, because people were grabbing them in the street, and firing from behind them. Gunmen shooting from a crowd of people–women and children included–they have to make a choice between allowing themselves and their friends to die, or to defend themsleves and probably kill a few innocents too. And they had to make that choice.
The helicoptor pilots have to make the same choices too.
pluto77189LOL, the B-52 may actually replace its replacer 😀
It’s pretty ironic. However, it Does make sense. The B1 is more of a racecar, incredibly big and powerful, high complexity and speed, massive payload. The B52 is like an old, simple(mechanically, compare to the B1) slow, truck. The B52 doesn’t go through the stresses the B1 does. The B1 carries more weapons, faster, under greater stresses, than the B52. It simply cannot take that strain for as long as the B52 can take its workload.
pluto77189The Navy had put that on hold, weeks ago…
In fact, there’s quite a bit of support FOR the landing strip.
there’s not too many environmental impacts involved, naturally speaking. The real problem is the impacts to the humans in the area, and the surrounding communities.
pluto77189Is this a face you could raise a gun to? 🙂
Not that face. but if there were 20,000 more than the environment could sustain, and ALL of them were starving, sick and skinny, I might.
Why have they gotten so overpopulated? Are we missing a predator here or something?
pluto77189what i cant understand is why anyone would want to be in any of those photos.
Probably because they’re in a war, and have just got done shooting dozens of people to death, and managed to capture some people that were trying to kill them. They probably never thought the pictures would be circulated, and did something incredibly stupid.
It’s no doubt happening quite often in Iraq. There are bound to be SOME a$$holes in ANY group of several hundred thousand people, military or not.
My friend that recently came back told us of some of the things he saw–not pretty. They never did anything like this to the prisoners, but treatment they gave the people that were trying to kill them was far from pleasant.
The 82nd and the british troops were repsected by the Iraqis, because they took no crap from anybody, and were VERY hard, but not malicious, like THESE idiots.
Being hard or heavy handed in a WAR is one thing, but simply degrading someone–no matter WHAT they did, nor even if they DESERVED to be treated as such–is not acceptable. It’s a black eye on the military, the country and the PURPOSE. Not to mention that the ALREADY biased Arab news networks wll have a field day with the REAL images…
pluto77189The Marines are “trying” something. They are handing security to Iraqis, with hopefully, some good results. If not, then I’m afraid they will have to go door to door, and clear the buildings.
To clarify things: The B52 can carry near 50,000 punds of bombs. these weapons can be dumb dropped, GPS guided to around 30 feet of the target, or laser guided to within 10 feet. The litening pod allows the B52 to identify and target things from high altitude, and use which ever bomb is good for the task. In other words, the “Terrorizing carpet bombing B-52” can lay down a heavy bomber’s load of Precision weapons. NOTE: PRECISION.
The B52 can do this loiter and find and kill thing better than other bombers. The B1 can hold more than the 52, and it’s faster. It’s the best “Kill THIS NOW” bomber we have, able to respond more quickly, with HEAVY weapons.
TheB2 can hold just a little less tonnage as the 52, but can carry more smaller weapons(It’s got really HUGE bomb bays). The B2 can get in places the others can’t, and drop either 16 2,000lb.gps hammers, 80 500lb gps bombs, or 192 gps sdb’s. 192 individually targeted bombs.
Say we have to attack “Capital city X” in “terrorstan.” The city has 3 airfields around it, and there are fighters at each one. With 192 bombs PER B2, 4 of them have 768 bombs, each accurate to with a few feet(better an dlonger ranged than Jdams). That means the bombers can put over 200 bombs into EACH airfield, with plenty for other targets.
What would happen if you buried 200 250lb bombs al over an airfield? Total destruction. Nothing could take off. Plus, the vast amount of bombs lets you target each hanger several times, destroying most of the planes.
That’s a tremendous amount of power.
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