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Battlefield Medkits Improve
ApharmdB writes "CNN has an article on the US military's fielding of a bandage containing clotting agents that can stop blood flow within two minutes. Obviously, the hope is that they will save a lot of lives. What's next straight from your favorite FPS? Who has an estimate on how long it will take for the Army to outfit its troops with anti-personnel rocket launchers?" Those have been around for quite a while.
that's what I want to see on CNN!
When are they going to make a railgun?
those who are camping next to those medkits. Damnit! Why someone would put a rocket launcher and a mega-health in the same room is beyond me...
The time I got hit by a car on my motorcycle.
Owww!
EMT's should be given these, they could save lots of lives.
Now, my girlfriend at her time in the month...I'm sure she'd like these too! Our sheets thank you.
...these bandages would make effective tampons?
...not an anti-personnel weapon, but I'm running out of hairs to split.
But do they spin round so you can see them more easily in the heat of battle ?
Spin, little medkit, spin!
graspee
Who has an estimate on how long it will take for the Army to outfit its troops with anti-personnel rocket launchers?
We don't really need more anti-personnel equipment
War nowadays is more about accuretley knocking out specific enemy targets. Communications and flight and aircraft and the like
Not just killing everybody
America had developed small antipersonnel nukes during the cold war. These are well known of, but they don't see the light of day
Some things are better left unbuilt.
Quake and cousins would be so much more boring if you could only use the rocket launcher against enemy vehicles -- there are a lot fewer of those than enemy troops :)
About those anti-personel rocket launchers, we're closer than you may think. The OICW (the next-generation combat weapon being tested for deployment throughout the armed services) includes a computer-aimed grenade launcher which is smart enough to compute a perfect air-burst over a designated target, and which can handle a range of ammunition types.
The SMAW is anti-armor, not anti-personel. Oh and Slashdot is incredibly slow. Maybe you should invest in some more hardware or bandwidth.
Who do you think is in the bunkers? I've fired one of these, and I assure you it will work just fine against people.
Won't need any bandages for the recipient, either.
The Davy Crockett
If you work out, you might be able to carry one on each shoulder!
Is this the promised end? Or image of that horror? KING LEAR
Doesn't the military already use a powder that helps clot blood much faster than normal? Similar to the cut stop powder that farmers and ranchers use for animals? Or is this a product that they used to use?
Are there any former/current medics than can shed some light on this?
It's interesting that the new clotting agent permeates a bandage, though.
The only thing that we learn from history is that nobody learns anything from history.
I can't believe we're still using soldiers with blood in them.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Hmmm the moderators think its informative that a rocket launcher will kill a human being. Says a lot about moderators doesn't it? SUVs work just fine against people too. That doesn't make them anti-personel weapons. (technically)
What I want is an orange suit that dispenses morphine whenever I take damage and lets me run around with a broken leg.
"Whaddaya mean you stapled yourself 127 times?!"
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Who has an estimate on how long it will take for the Army to outfit its troops with anti-personnel rocket launchers?
;)
It's called an M203, law, vlaw, and rpg.
Invest what?
I already beat them up and took their milk-money.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Why is this apparently a lost technology? I couldn't even find mention of it in a google search.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Who has an estimate on how long it will take for the Army to outfit its troops with anti-personnel rocket launchers?
OICW - Entering service late this decade You can chain fire grenades, set them to explode on impact, just after impact (for penetrating windows) or at a set distance (for exploding over people's heads).
Alternatively, if you want a BIG F***ING GUN, nothing says I love you quite like a GMG (Grenade Machine Gun) - yeah, that's right, a Grenade MG - 40mmx53 grenades, 350 cyclic rate. If I remember rightly, it comes with an optional nightsight (Oh so useful if 350 grenades a minute don't light the target up enough for you)
The army already is looking to buy a BFG.
Take a look at the CRUSADER 155MM SELF PROPELLED HOWITZER
No Frag Limit.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
A lot of medical innovations have come out of the military in the past, much like innovations in other industries (computers, aviation)
Blood plasma comes to mind. Way back some army docs realized that if you lose a huge amount of blood, you're more likely to die of shock simply because your heart has nothing to pump around.
They realized you can use a centrifuge to take out all the red blood cells, dehydrate what's left, and all you need to do is add distilled water and get it into the body of an exsanguinated soldier. Just the fact that theres some fluid in the system for the heart to pump is enough to keep you alive until you can replace the red blood cells, and other gook in there..
It works regardless of blood type, takes less space, and doesn't require refrigeration (keeps longer).
Science has long been at it's best when its at war. Make of that what you will, but it's always been so.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Here's my question... can they be applied using only one hand? This has been a big problem with personal first aid kids for quite some time.
Durning the final couple of months in the last War with Iraq, several companys built hundreds of thousands of Personal GPS's to supply one to every soldier. When the war ended they were stuck with most of their inventory and the public got the GPS's at affordible prices 5 to 10 years quicker than normal military trickle down. I hope the same thing happens with those bandages, otherwise they will be quite expensive for local ER's to stock them. Hell in a few years we could all have them stocked in our home.
It's like the myth about how .50 cal can only be used against material, and not combatants. Even people in the military to this day think that it's not okay to engage humans with the .50, but instead to "shoot their canteens or weapons out of their hands..oops I accidently killed him!" This is a myth, we can engage any combatant with a .50.
.50 cal myth came from when the brass in Vietnam said told Marines and/or soldiers in a particular AO (area of operations) not to engage VC or NVA with the .50 due to ammo resupply issues, and to engage them with M16s, etc.
;)
A Capt of Marines recently told me that the
This was purely to save ammo in one instance. Not due to any international law.
Also, in the Hague convention is where you'd find anything close to regulating ammo used on combatants. Such as "weapons that cause unneeded suffering" such as "exploding bullets."
You've probably seen movies where they use rockets to clear out bunkers. What's the difference in bombing a bunker with an A-10 and firing a rocket in it? Does this make any sense to regulate the use of rockets on personal?
I'd also like to mention that I'd like snopes.com to investigate this
rm -rf ~/.signature
The anti-hemorrhagic bandage was developed by Dr. Kenton Gregory at the Oregon Medical Laser Center, and there is much more material about it at the website of the company formed to commercialize the technology, HemCon.
The secret to the patch is a particular formulation of chitin, which is to stay, crabshells. The pro-clotting properties of chitin have been well-known for some time, but Dr. Gregory and his researchers were able to figure out how to make a viable bandage out of it, which hadn't been done before.
The OMLC is working on lots of other cool stuff as well, such as laser suturing (very good for your liver, which won't take thread sutures).
Full disclosure: I'm on their Board of Directors.
gnetwerker
...a version for after I shave?
Where's the Quad Damage and the Redeemer?
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
The young men and women the Administration is sending off all volunteered to be in the service, then volunteered again to be in an MOS that would put them in harms way.
This morning a kid I knew growing up AIM'ed to say he was shipping out. He is a Marine Sniper-scout so you can imagine he's not that shocked about being sent off to war. I asked if his rifle was sighted in and he responded with a "Hell yea and I hope I get to go hunting".
The oil interest arguement always makes me shake my head.
Iraq used to export lots of oil to the US, Iraq told the US over and over in the 90s that Iraq would sell the US oil at 2 dollars below market price. Iraq told the US it would cut special deals with US companies.
So what freaking sense is there to going to war for that oil? If it wa all about oil interests it would be cheaper and more responsable t let Iraq keep killing civilians and sell the west oil.
Think GM, Ford, Exxon-Mobil and Halliburton are excited about the prospect of oil hitting 60 dollars a barrel and cutting corporate income?
Show me this empire you speak of, are the Aghanis or Iraqis going to be paying the US taxes? Are we going to force our excess Crystal-meth into thier markets for some income? Are we going to make them change thier customs and language?
If you think the US is empire building, then you need to take a look at what happens when empires are built.
Not true. That is another version of the "shoot at their belt buckles with the 50 cal." myth. Don't have it handy, but what I remember from my Law of Land Warfare class at my Officers course in the Army is that the Geneva Convention prohibits weapons that are intended to maim, not wound or kill cleanly. Prohibits things such as saw tooth bayonets, dum-dum (hollow point) bullets etc. Heavy Machine Guns, RPG rounds and nukes etc are OK. Go figure. What I do remember is when the JAG Major said that all weapons in the U.S. inventory meet the Geneva Convention requirements and I asked him "What about the M-14(?) toe-popper mine?" he got huffy and locked me up at attention.
"Who has an estimate on how long it will take for the Army to outfit its troops with anti-personnel rocket launchers?"
Why? In real life, assult rifles hurt a lot more than they do in some popular FPSs (Half-Life comes to mind).
Besides, FPSs have the advantage of the Incredible Shrinking Ammo, the ability to carry dozens of reloads for that rocket launcher with no detrimental effects.
Oh, and then there's the ability to fire (accurately!) what is essentially a support weapon while walking/running/jumping. And people/objects behind you don't need to worry about backwash...
They will need to sneak in and hide these kits throughout a building, and hope they get found... ;)
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If they are using high grade pure cocaine flakes to cauterize wounds like a lot of places then I doubt they'll be using them for what they intended.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Consider portability - you fire a small piece of steel at several thousand kph... the recoil is going to blow off your own arm. Every reaction and whatnot...
From Movie Physics in the Classroom:
As Lee observes, "...they said the physics [of the rail gun] were impossible", and we're inclined to heartily agree. The first problem is a nasty little law of physics called conservation of momentum. Briefly, this states that the forward momentum of the bullet must be counteracted by the backward momentum of the gun. The magnitude of an object's momentum is equal to its mass times the magnitude of its velocity, as expressed by the following equation:
p = mv
We know that the bullet is travelling close to the speed of light (3 × 108 m/s). To be conservative, we will assume the bullet travels at only half the speed of light, and that its mass is about the mass of a paper clip (0.0005 kg). For the sake of simplicity, we will ignore the effects of relativity, which would cause the bullet's mass to be even greater. Thus, we calculate the bullet's momentum:
pbullet = (0.0005 kg)(½)(3 × 108 m/s) = 7.5 × 104 Ns
If we assume the mass of the rifle is 10 kg, its backward velocity must be 7.5 × 104 Ns divided by 10 kg, which equals 7500 m/s. Compared to the velocity of a .45 cal bullet going a sedate 330 m/s, our rail gun would be a mite difficult to hold.
Okay, so the gun has a little kickback; so what? Well, let's look at the bullet's kinetic energy, calculated from the equation:
KE = ½mv2
Hence, the kinetic energy of the bullet would be:
KEbullet = (½)(0.0005 kg)(1.5 × 108 m/s)2 = 5.625 × 1012 J
The impact of our bullet would be like blowing up over 1000 tons of TNT. Needless to say this would take out a little more than just Vanessa Williams.
-T
There's no problem with wounding people.
In fact the M-16 was designed specifically with wounding in mind. The .203 caliber bullet is smaller and lighter than the .30 caliber bullets used in previous U.S. military rifles, and the primary reason is because it's more likely to wound rather than to kill. Not to avoid killing, but because if you wound one soldier, you generally take two soldiers out of action -- the one that got hit and the buddy that has to care for him and drag him to safety.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I wonder if there are any allergies associated with it, or if you have to use a patch that corresponds to your blood type...
I wonder how long technology like this trickles down to the civilian sector. As a paramedic in New York City our protocol for trauma has always been scoop and run, the thinking being that a trauma patient needs a surgeon, not a paramedic or an EMT.
This technology could easily be used by EMS personell en route with a trauma patient to the ER.