Cars already have an inherent vulnerability to electric attack. Police departments have, for quite some time, been trying to develop a little vehicle that sort of shoots out from under the police car, zooms under the car the cops are pursuing, and zaps it enough to screw up the cars computer. If somebody set up a wire sticking out of the road connected to a large capacitor, and you drove over it, your car would coast to a gentle stop while your car's computer drifts out from under your hood as a cloud of blue smoke.
Much the same thing would happen if your clutch unexpectedly turned to liquid. Your brakes still work fine in both situatuations, though.
Gee, letting your car get hit by lightning or flipping it over might cause trouble with incorporated nanotechnology? I'd better just stick to the old style technology, which of course has no parts which can be screwed up by lightning or downed power lines. Uhmmm, yeah.
Ever hear of spark plugs? Their operation depends on electricity. Putting an electric charge across a spark plug at the wrong time can cause problems with your engine's operation. What about that thing that controls your fuel mixture, ignition timing, and on some cars the transmission? Unless you're driving a pre-1985 car, it's handled by a computer. Computers, as you might be surprised to hear, can malfunction or even be damaged by unexpected electric currents. So driving over a downed power line is a bad idea? No shit, Sherlock!
Also, nanotech parts might degrade with age. One more reason to stick with the old stuff, where every part of the car works perfectly forever, and never has to be replaced. Uhmmm, yeah.
Try driving for a few years with the same set of brake pads. You just might get a Darwin award for your trouble, but you also might survive the crash. Also, see what happens if you never change your piston rings, oil, trans fluid, brake fluid, etc. Cars that need maintenance are nothing new.
My point is, where do you get off saying that old technology is more reliable when the new technology hasn't even been tested? What if the tests show that the electromagnetic trans fluid will last 10 or 15 years before showing any signs of degradation? Besides, driving with a completely untested liquid clutch is no more dangerous than driving with a Ford transmission.
This is exactly what the insurance companies want to find out. If they can deny coverage to people with a high probability of becoming terminally ill while young, they can increase their profits. Basically, they want to make sure that you pay many times your coverage before anything gets paid.
"We here at Ripemoff Insurance just want to ensure that the death of a family member does not place financial burden on the surviving members. And we've always really liked fat sacks full of cash money."
"Do you like my hat? It's made of MONEY!"
"Would you like to stay for lunch? I think we're having MONEY!"
She's a politician. Wave enough money under a politician's nose, and they'll do anything you want regardless of party affiliation. She was probably just the cheapest vote-whore they could find.
The publications in question are scientific journals. The people who write the articles in them are paid by universities, research grants, and sometimes large companies. (The corporate-funded research has less of a tendancy to show up in journals.)
The people who publish the journals just take the articles, print them, write up a table of contents, and slap a cover on it. Clearly that's deserving of $14,000 for 12 issues. Yeah. Uh-huh.
The one cost to the publishers I'm not sure about is paying for the articles themselves. How much to the researchers get paid to publish their work? Judging by the cars parked outside the Cyclotron, I'd say they don't get paid enough to warrant $1200 an issue. Anybody have something more definite?
I think it's more fun with PVC tubing and a lot of propane, but hey, if it works it works. My way is a bit noisier, though. (Then again, several guys with 15-proof blood and a giant slingshot probably aren't that quiet.)
The Chinese had the use of gunpowder down right the first time, too. Fireworks. Blowing shit up for the hell of it, not for killing people. Now that's an area that needs some research grants.
Chemist #1: So what industry are you working in?
Chemist #2: Blowin' shit up.
Chemist #1: Oh, like for mining? Or building demolition? Or weapons?
Chemist #2: Nope. Just cuz we feel like blowin' shit up.
First: the object doesn't have to be anywhere near the size of a bus to survive re-entry. When the Iridium satellites were supposed to come down, many predictions about their re-entry were made. Several pieces from each satellite were capable of surviving (at least partially) re-entry some of the time. One was a 10-lb titanium structural bracket. Not streamlined, not the size of a bus. Dense and hear-resistant, yes.
Nobody has ever used the orbiting steel rods because of a little treaty that strictly prohibits the use of space for offensive purposes. Passive measures like spy satellites are fine, but absolutely no weapons are allowed under the treaty. Don't ask me how Star Wars was supposed to get around this. Maybe they just planned to ignore the treaty, as is currently being done with a different missile defence scheme.
They don't drop steel bars from aircraft because
1) The terminal velocity of a properly shaped piece of steel can't be reached in 30,000 feet. They fail to realize their destructive potential when dropped from aircraft.
2) It's a lot more effective to drop streamlined steel tubes containing 2000 pounds or so of mixed TNT & RDX from aircraft at 30,000-50,000 feet. There are many aircraft designed to do this and nothing else. One prime example is the Boeing B-52. Accuracy still remains a problem.
But you need a pretty good kick to cause the orbit to decay fast enough. Several percent of orbital velocity, at least (can't remember the numbers to say how much). So you have to invest enough energy (and recoil in the orbital platform) to decelerate them by a few hundred miles per hour. It's still a pretty good payoff when the thing hits ground doing mach 20.
Might you get a better yield (less of the rod vaporizing) by making the tip out of carbon or ceramic? I think something with a ridiculously high melting point on the tip would be advantageous.
I believe that variant is called a plasma-armature railgun. The simpler way to do it is just let the projectile do the conducting, since the only thing that really matters is the Lorentz force on the conducting body, plasma or otherwise.
Plasma armature guns have some advantages, such as being able to fire non-conductive projectiles, and the projectile tends to stick to the rails less.
And I thought the external magnetic field was usually from permanent magnets, not a coil. A coil with the axis parallel to the rails would propel the projectile perpendicular to the rails and the coil, which would obviously not work too well. So the coil is in the same plane as the rails? Could be some design difficulty there, but it would work. Mebbe I should find some detailed design documents on these - I'm going mainly on freshman E&M textbook stuff.
The problem with the first gun mentioned was reloading. The setup was a 120mm(?) tank cannon firing into another barrel (122mm or so) full of hydrogen and oxygen. The projectile compresses the gas mixture around its sides as it passes, heating it to the point of ignition. Most of the combustion occurs behind the projectile, giving it a hell of a kick.
But you need a new, fuel-filled, sealed barrel for each shot. Clearly that's not gonna be easy on a battlefield.
The Nazi multi-chamber gun also had a slight problem with shock waves and constructive interference. Every time a chamber fired, it created a new shock wave travelling through the barrel. It only takes one point where 3 or 4 of those waves interfere constructively to rip a hole in the barrel, which of course ruins the gun crew's day.
Yeah... Tesla really gets screwed in the history books.
As for the A-bomb developers, a couple of them were also over here for some kind of political reason, I forget what it was. Something to do with Germany...
And nearly everyone who calls themselves American is foreign, with the exception of the guys who were here before Columbus got lost.
I knew a guy whose physics prof required his students to use slide rules on tests. No other computational devices were allowed ('cept yer fingers), and the math on the tests was pretty ugly. Some people's capacity for Ludditism is amazing.
Re:Light projectiles have lower recoil / energy.
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Precisely. It's very hard to get chemical propellants to yield muzzle velocities much higher than 5000 f/s or so, in infantry-sized calibers. The idea is to get the.22 bullet up to the point where it has the momentum of the.50 cal, and hence much greater kinetic energy. At that kind of velocity, the damage from such a small projectile would be pretty impressive, as would penetration.
Yes, it is lots of work for something as effective as a conventional weapon. But the point was made earlier that the first powder-fired guns were tremendously inferior to a longbow, and were much more expensive. The gun had a lot more potential for development, though.
As for the tank not needing to worry about recoil, I was talking about fairly small-caliber projectiles. The size of the projectile the vehicle can fire effectively depends on the amount of power supply equipment it can carry. A vehicle the size of a tank can't very well power a 155mm railgun.
Current chemical propellant technology is indisputably superior to current electromagnetic propulsion (no pun intended). That doesn't mean it's going to stay that way.
Limeys? Maybe they don't like 'Merican nukes. French? Now THEY like their nuclear missiles. Remember when they got everybody all pissed about their nuclear testing a couple years back? How many tree-huggers do you see detonating nuclear weapons just for the hell of it?
I distinctly remember a demonstration in E&M last semester, in which aluminum and copper rings were launched a few feet off of a large coil, with an AC current. The principle was the changing current in the coil creates a changing mangetic field, which induces an opposing current in the conducting ring.
What happens when you replace the copper ring with a chunk of 70-Kelvin YBaCO (the usual high-temp superconductor, I forget the ratios of elements), and place it inside the coil, where the magnetic field is significantly more intense? I imagine you could get a pretty good velocity from something like that. Since it's just powered by AC (what effect does the frequency have on velocity?) you don't have the switching problems you do with the coilgun mentioned so many times before.
I'd do the math to figure out what velocity you'd get from 120VAC and some typical coil, but I'm way too lazy.
Re:10K fps... Fastest conventional is around 4500f
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"Vonce rockets are up, who cares where zey come down? Zat's not my depaatment," says Werner von Braun.
The recoil would only rip limbs off of you used too large a projectile. A piece of copper the size of a.22 bullet would do plenty of damage at sufficient speed, and wouldn't cause too much recoil for a human. The power source would still be a big problem, though. A modified tank chassis could probably hold a big enough generator and enough capacitors. And with a firing platform that size, recoil isn't really an issue. As with the video game railguns, cycle time would be pathetic, since you'd have to recharge the capacitors completely between shots.
All but a few old aircraft have no feedback in the stick. Everything designed in the past 15 years or so just translates the stick movements into digital signals, which are sent to the hydraulic control system. The only feedback the pilot feels in the stick is from springs, just as with your joystick or wheel. All the pilot's information comes either from instruments or from feeling the physical movements of the aircraft as a whole.
True that it didn't work then. It seems to be working now, or at least coming dangerously close to working.
People then seemed to be significantly more willing to stand up, grab a rifle, and really enforce their rights. So far, peaceful legal opposition has stopped the more abrupt, flagrant abuses of power. Very little seems to be happening to stop the more gradual erosion of personal liberty.
I really have to thank the MPAA for being stupid enough to let this case get public. Anything that gets more people to realize what kind of state their freedoms are in is, at least in part, a good thing.
Religious organizations can get government money for charitable projects. They just have to demonstrate that the charity is distinct from the religion - essentially, that they're not saying "Join our church and we'll give you food."
What Duhbya's "faith-based" charity program allows is essentially federally funded churches, as long as the churches use some of the money for charity. My local newspaper had an article today which talked about some effects of a similar program already going on in Texas. The interesting part was that about 1/3 of the end recipients of the charity said that they had been pressured to join a religious organization or to change their beliefs.
The federal government has absolutely no right to use my tax money to convert heathens to some governmentally preferred religion. I would really like to read the text of the bill, when it becomes available. I'd like to see how they make it sound like "We're going to give money to churches" isn't a "law respecting an establishment of religion."
I was making such progress on breaking my MOO addiction, and they have to start designing another one. They just don't want me to get my homework done, do they?
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Much the same thing would happen if your clutch unexpectedly turned to liquid. Your brakes still work fine in both situatuations, though.
Ever hear of spark plugs? Their operation depends on electricity. Putting an electric charge across a spark plug at the wrong time can cause problems with your engine's operation. What about that thing that controls your fuel mixture, ignition timing, and on some cars the transmission? Unless you're driving a pre-1985 car, it's handled by a computer. Computers, as you might be surprised to hear, can malfunction or even be damaged by unexpected electric currents. So driving over a downed power line is a bad idea? No shit, Sherlock!
Also, nanotech parts might degrade with age. One more reason to stick with the old stuff, where every part of the car works perfectly forever, and never has to be replaced. Uhmmm, yeah.
Try driving for a few years with the same set of brake pads. You just might get a Darwin award for your trouble, but you also might survive the crash. Also, see what happens if you never change your piston rings, oil, trans fluid, brake fluid, etc. Cars that need maintenance are nothing new.
My point is, where do you get off saying that old technology is more reliable when the new technology hasn't even been tested? What if the tests show that the electromagnetic trans fluid will last 10 or 15 years before showing any signs of degradation? Besides, driving with a completely untested liquid clutch is no more dangerous than driving with a Ford transmission.
This is exactly what the insurance companies want to find out. If they can deny coverage to people with a high probability of becoming terminally ill while young, they can increase their profits. Basically, they want to make sure that you pay many times your coverage before anything gets paid.
"We here at Ripemoff Insurance just want to ensure that the death of a family member does not place financial burden on the surviving members. And we've always really liked fat sacks full of cash money."
"Do you like my hat? It's made of MONEY!"
"Would you like to stay for lunch? I think we're having MONEY!"
(sorry for the blatant Penny Arcade rip-off)
She's a politician. Wave enough money under a politician's nose, and they'll do anything you want regardless of party affiliation. She was probably just the cheapest vote-whore they could find.
The people who publish the journals just take the articles, print them, write up a table of contents, and slap a cover on it. Clearly that's deserving of $14,000 for 12 issues. Yeah. Uh-huh.
The one cost to the publishers I'm not sure about is paying for the articles themselves. How much to the researchers get paid to publish their work? Judging by the cars parked outside the Cyclotron, I'd say they don't get paid enough to warrant $1200 an issue. Anybody have something more definite?
The guy(s) who wrote Gnutella never gave anything away. Shit. Another bad example.
Alright, how about the ones who... No, they gave it away too.
But what about... Damn! They gave their stuff away also.
I'm sure I can think of somebody, just gimme a minute...
I think it's more fun with PVC tubing and a lot of propane, but hey, if it works it works. My way is a bit noisier, though. (Then again, several guys with 15-proof blood and a giant slingshot probably aren't that quiet.)
Chemist #1: So what industry are you working in?
Chemist #2: Blowin' shit up.
Chemist #1: Oh, like for mining? Or building demolition? Or weapons?
Chemist #2: Nope. Just cuz we feel like blowin' shit up.
Nobody has ever used the orbiting steel rods because of a little treaty that strictly prohibits the use of space for offensive purposes. Passive measures like spy satellites are fine, but absolutely no weapons are allowed under the treaty. Don't ask me how Star Wars was supposed to get around this. Maybe they just planned to ignore the treaty, as is currently being done with a different missile defence scheme.
They don't drop steel bars from aircraft because
1) The terminal velocity of a properly shaped piece of steel can't be reached in 30,000 feet. They fail to realize their destructive potential when dropped from aircraft.
2) It's a lot more effective to drop streamlined steel tubes containing 2000 pounds or so of mixed TNT & RDX from aircraft at 30,000-50,000 feet. There are many aircraft designed to do this and nothing else. One prime example is the Boeing B-52. Accuracy still remains a problem.
Might you get a better yield (less of the rod vaporizing) by making the tip out of carbon or ceramic? I think something with a ridiculously high melting point on the tip would be advantageous.
Plasma armature guns have some advantages, such as being able to fire non-conductive projectiles, and the projectile tends to stick to the rails less.
And I thought the external magnetic field was usually from permanent magnets, not a coil. A coil with the axis parallel to the rails would propel the projectile perpendicular to the rails and the coil, which would obviously not work too well. So the coil is in the same plane as the rails? Could be some design difficulty there, but it would work. Mebbe I should find some detailed design documents on these - I'm going mainly on freshman E&M textbook stuff.
But you need a new, fuel-filled, sealed barrel for each shot. Clearly that's not gonna be easy on a battlefield.
The Nazi multi-chamber gun also had a slight problem with shock waves and constructive interference. Every time a chamber fired, it created a new shock wave travelling through the barrel. It only takes one point where 3 or 4 of those waves interfere constructively to rip a hole in the barrel, which of course ruins the gun crew's day.
As for the A-bomb developers, a couple of them were also over here for some kind of political reason, I forget what it was. Something to do with Germany...
And nearly everyone who calls themselves American is foreign, with the exception of the guys who were here before Columbus got lost.
I knew a guy whose physics prof required his students to use slide rules on tests. No other computational devices were allowed ('cept yer fingers), and the math on the tests was pretty ugly. Some people's capacity for Ludditism is amazing.
Yes, it is lots of work for something as effective as a conventional weapon. But the point was made earlier that the first powder-fired guns were tremendously inferior to a longbow, and were much more expensive. The gun had a lot more potential for development, though.
As for the tank not needing to worry about recoil, I was talking about fairly small-caliber projectiles. The size of the projectile the vehicle can fire effectively depends on the amount of power supply equipment it can carry. A vehicle the size of a tank can't very well power a 155mm railgun.
Current chemical propellant technology is indisputably superior to current electromagnetic propulsion (no pun intended). That doesn't mean it's going to stay that way.
Limeys? Maybe they don't like 'Merican nukes. French? Now THEY like their nuclear missiles. Remember when they got everybody all pissed about their nuclear testing a couple years back? How many tree-huggers do you see detonating nuclear weapons just for the hell of it?
What happens when you replace the copper ring with a chunk of 70-Kelvin YBaCO (the usual high-temp superconductor, I forget the ratios of elements), and place it inside the coil, where the magnetic field is significantly more intense? I imagine you could get a pretty good velocity from something like that. Since it's just powered by AC (what effect does the frequency have on velocity?) you don't have the switching problems you do with the coilgun mentioned so many times before.
I'd do the math to figure out what velocity you'd get from 120VAC and some typical coil, but I'm way too lazy.
Tom Lehrer rocks.
The recoil would only rip limbs off of you used too large a projectile. A piece of copper the size of a .22 bullet would do plenty of damage at sufficient speed, and wouldn't cause too much recoil for a human. The power source would still be a big problem, though. A modified tank chassis could probably hold a big enough generator and enough capacitors. And with a firing platform that size, recoil isn't really an issue. As with the video game railguns, cycle time would be pathetic, since you'd have to recharge the capacitors completely between shots.
All but a few old aircraft have no feedback in the stick. Everything designed in the past 15 years or so just translates the stick movements into digital signals, which are sent to the hydraulic control system. The only feedback the pilot feels in the stick is from springs, just as with your joystick or wheel. All the pilot's information comes either from instruments or from feeling the physical movements of the aircraft as a whole.
So this is how we can activate the frickin' laser beams on the sharks' heads!
The story mentioned that "Scientists designed software that can adjust for each pilot's nerve patterns, which can be affected by caffeine use..."
These guys know their market pretty well.
People then seemed to be significantly more willing to stand up, grab a rifle, and really enforce their rights. So far, peaceful legal opposition has stopped the more abrupt, flagrant abuses of power. Very little seems to be happening to stop the more gradual erosion of personal liberty.
I really have to thank the MPAA for being stupid enough to let this case get public. Anything that gets more people to realize what kind of state their freedoms are in is, at least in part, a good thing.
Religious organizations can get government money for charitable projects. They just have to demonstrate that the charity is distinct from the religion - essentially, that they're not saying "Join our church and we'll give you food."
What Duhbya's "faith-based" charity program allows is essentially federally funded churches, as long as the churches use some of the money for charity. My local newspaper had an article today which talked about some effects of a similar program already going on in Texas. The interesting part was that about 1/3 of the end recipients of the charity said that they had been pressured to join a religious organization or to change their beliefs.
The federal government has absolutely no right to use my tax money to convert heathens to some governmentally preferred religion. I would really like to read the text of the bill, when it becomes available. I'd like to see how they make it sound like "We're going to give money to churches" isn't a "law respecting an establishment of religion."
I was making such progress on breaking my MOO addiction, and they have to start designing another one. They just don't want me to get my homework done, do they?