Slashdot Mirror
DARPA Looking into Hypersonic Bombers
while(true) writes "As reported previously here on Slashdot, hypersonic jets from NASA has recently been in the news. Now DARPA is showing interest in the military applications and is to host a conference on hypersonic unmanned bombers. These bombers could be based in the US and yet strike from space at any place in the world within 2 hours. BBC has a report about these air/spacecraft that could be operational by 2025."
Why do you have such fast bombers?
The better to bomb the living fuck out of you, my dear.
So we can respond in two hours, now all we need is intel that isn't two DAYS old...
Why on earth would I care about DARPA projects? It's not like they've affectd my day-to-day life. I mean, why do people care about DARPA anyway? It's not like they built the internet or anything. Oh well. Maybe I'm just out of the loop.
---- Move SIG...For great justice!
"The whole project goes under the acronym Falcon - Force Application and Launch from the Continental United States."
hmmm... I think that's the most contrived acronym I have *ever* seen... was "COOL DEATH EAGLE" already taken?
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
Two hours was the striking distance for the roving bombers in Dr. Stragelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I was in grad school as an aerospace/fluids engineer in the mid 90's during the aerospace boom (a bit like the dot-com boom). Hypersonic aircraft were on the drawing board but never made it. Turns out we didn't have a sufficient understanding of hypersonics. Building hypersonic wind tunnels and shock tubes is very difficult so computational models were used heavily. The computational models did not have sufficent validation due to lack of experimental data, so designing hypersonic vehicles turned out be a lot more difficult than originally thought. Also the materials problems in building aircraft that can tolerate the heat of hypersonic flight is still very significant. Titanium ceramic materials were developed, but manufacturing and machining with these materials was prohibitively expensive and difficult. Back then it the thinking was that the hypersonic modelling and material problems could be rapidly overcome and this technology was a few years off, it never happened though. I kust wonder if this is not just another Darpa pie-in-the-sky project where they are assuming difficult and unsolved problems can be surmounted. Guess we'll see if this project materializes, but I am skeptical. I think the Columbia disaster painfully illustrates the significant problems of hypersonic flight. MM
It is well documented that the USA has developed and maintains a large stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Even now the US is sitting on huge armaments of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, some of which are armed and ready to strike any city in the world within two hours. This rogue nation has already invaded and occupied one soverign state and has explicitely threatened several others. We cannot afford to wait until the USA has already struck -- we must force the Bush regime to disarm, or preemptively invade immediately to force a regime change. Our citizens' safety demands no less.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
But for some reason, the mainstream media in the US has chosen to simply roll over and play dead for the government. Remember all the play given to that boring and irrelevant Lewinsky case? But the fact that the government lied to get us into a war, the fact that the government has marked the enquiry on what went wrong on 9/11 as classified, crucial things involving life and death for thousands of Americans, have barely been mentioned here in the US.
You wonder whether the Republican Party doesn't simply have thousands of incriminating photographs in a file somewhere...
... which is apparently the peak US-bashing time on Slashdot. The US is wants to control everything. The US wants to burn fossil fuels until the planet chokes and eveyone dies. The US wants to poison everyone's language with transliterated American English. The US wants to destroy everyone's culture by building McDonalds and Walmarts everywhere. Blah blah blah.
Stow the rhetoric, please. Not everyone accepts that blather at face value.
An incredible amount of technology that we take for granted exists today because DARPA spent money on it and people complained about the size of the US defense budget (he says while sending his comment of the *internet*).
Hypersonic flight, whether ballistic or not, is incredibly hard to control. Manned or unmanned, incredibly hard to control. This sort of project will develop the skills and capabilities needed to engineer such an audacious plan. That knowledge barely exists now. How do you build something so insanely complex and difficult to control? How do you make it reliable? Someday, that knowledge of how to build impressive stuff will be used to build impressive stuff you'll use everyday.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
Much as I abhor the idea of war, I find myself fascinated by the instruments with which it is waged. I am ashamed of this.
American society needs to get over this Cold War fascination with ever larger, more powerful, and more complex military technology. The military is not the solution to every problem, they are just a last resort when we have no real solution.
We need to expend more effort developing technologies that will really improve our lives, no matter how gee-whiz hypersonic bombers, planetary annihilation lasers, and the like, may be.
Even human cloning would be better than this. Honestly.
With the leadership of this country seriously questionable, the developement of these bombers may further encourage irresponsible wars/police actions/whatever.
On the other hypersonic bombers sound really really cool.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
The mines decide as a group what configuration is best and then move to fill the gap.
I wonder how they go about it...
"Okay, Frank...hop over into that gap right there."
"Shit, no! Larry just got run over by a TANK! Did you see that? You hop into the gap, asshole!"