Similarly, it is assumed that if you have a public wireless network, you invite the public to use it to a reasonable extent.
Okay, that's a more-or-less reasonable argument: that in the absence of a sign saying "Hands off!", you can assume tacit permission has been granted to use some of those resources.
I don't agree. If you can take network resources by that argument, why not tap into the building's electrical service and grab a few spare amperes? Clearly, if you applied that argument to the building's electricity, or its water service, or the gasoline in your neighbor's car, nobody would buy it. I'm not sure why it's suddenly a valid argument when applied to bandwidth.
But it's at least something that can be argued: that by not denying permission, the owner has in effect granted permission. I was mainly taking exception to the ridiculous assertion that taking it when permission has been denied is not actually theft unless the owner notices the absence of the bandwidth he's paid for.
No, because you can't drive someone's car without making it worse in one way or another
That's one way an analogy breaks down, yes, but it doesn't change the fundamental fact that you are taking a finite and rival good from the legitimate owner. That is theft. Whatever amount of bandwidth you are using, however small, is a chunk that he is unable to use, despite the fact that he has paid for it.
If you steal only 1 slice of bread from a loaf I've purchased, you may not have significantly impeded my ability to make a sandwhich, but you've still deprive me of my rightful bread.
If someone pulls into my driveway in order to turn their car around, that's just fine with me.
That's nice of you. Of course, since it's your property, you'd be equally within your rights to say that it's not fine with you, and post signs to that effect and go after those who ignored it for trespassing upon your property.
Additionally, taking someone's car is stealing -- you deprive them of the car. Using someone's bandwidth is likely not, unless you use so much that they can't get their work done.
No, both are the same. Both cars and bandwidth are rival goods, existing in finite supply and useable by only a single individual at a time. Yes, you might say that if you're only using 10kbps of a 10mbps pipe, you're not using enough to seriously impact the guy who pays for that pipe, but you might just as well say that if you steal a guy's car while he's asleep and return it before he wakes up, you haven't really stolen it because you didn't impede his use.
The brain (lossily and selectively) records what the eyes see.
In other words, the brain doesn't do at all what a video camera pointed at a given area does, making a wealth of cameras blanketing an area quantitatively different from a bunch of people walking through that area intent on their daily tasks. That's probably part of the reason why eyewitness testimony about what happened in, say, a car accident isn't anywhere near so accurate as a videotape of the same incident.
Thanks for catching my entire point.
I'd feel you were stalking me
There are laws against such behavior, of course. What if, instead of following you around, I just arranged to have a bunch of video cameras placed in your path. Wouldn't that still be stalking?
Why should a corporation have a power that it's illegal for me to yield?
Yes, people can see you when you're walking about your daily business, but mutant superpowers aside, they're not watching you intently and making a file of everywhere you visit and everything you do.
If every day when you left the house, I started following you with a digital video camera and stopped only when you returned home, I'd just bet that you'd feel I was invading your privacy.
Unless you're some sort of exhibitionist freak, of course.
And I bet that huge killer lasers are a lot more environmentall friendly than the current nasty chemicals used in conventional weapons.
Huge killer lasers that use a chemical reaction to pump the beam generate some horrifically nasty chemical byproducts. Take a COIL, a chemical oxygen-iodine laser. You don't want to breathe, ingest, or even look too hard at what's leftover when one of those fires.
Depends. Take all the energy dissipated by those hairdryers in, say, 1 second, cram it into a pulse lasting, oh, say, a microsecond, and you're dumping a lot of power. That sort of power will happily break things.
Or, to put it another way: 100 kilowatts, isn't that like 135 horsepower? How much damage can you do with 135 horsepower? Try driving a Ford Festiva into a bridge abutment at 70 miles per hour, and you'll find out.
I guess their strategy was to assume that they could outrun any danger.
There was no assumption about it; that's specifically what it was designed to do. The SR-72 could, outrun any danger, and probably still could today. When it's going into hostile airspace, it's running flat out at over Mach 3, and at very high altitudes of over 80,000 feet.
Even if the plane you're trying to intercept it with can go that high, that's a hella difficult intercept geometry. Even for SAMs, which can travel at high Mach numbers, that's a hella difficult intercept geometry.
Over 4,000 missiles have been fired at SR-71s over the years. Not one SR-71 was ever lost due to enemy fire.
Assume, my ass. And really, let's face it; if you take a missile hit at Mach 3 and angels 80, the design of your fuel tanks is not going to make a bit of a difference, because the aerodynamic forces are going to rip the plane to shreds faster than you can say "Challenger."
The fuel wasn't cryogenic, either. STP when it went into the tanks.
Re:Not the first time fuel has been used to cool
on
More on JSF Laser System
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· Score: 5, Informative
It used a hydrocarbon fuel not very different from kerosene.
Very different from kerosene. Most military jet aircraft run on JP-5 or JP-8, which are essentially aviation kerosenes.
The SR-71 runs on JP-7. JP-7 is a more viscous fuel with a low vapor pressure and a very high flashpoint. So high, in fact, that the SR-71 can't start its own engines. To light the fires on a Blackbird takes a chemical ignition system, where the ground crew squirts a measure of tetraethylborane into the engines. TEB is actually hypergolic with JP-7, and the resultant explosion starts the engines.
The airframe heats up to 1000 degrees F in high mach flight, and so it has to be built to fit together nice at the higher temperature. When it's on the ground and cool, it does indeed leak fuel like a sieve. And yes, they do pump fuel from tank to tank in flight to cool hot spots.
Dear lord, what a plane. 5.2 thrust-to-weight ratio. 3200km/h. 85,000 ft ceiling. 1100 C inlet temperatures. 2000 degree combustion exhaust. Has successfully evaded over 4,000 SAMs.
That's all very nice. It's not particularly interesting to point out that a talented player of any game, even with mediocre equipment, will beat out a neophyte who spends more money on equipment. If I trade Andre Agassi my beat-to-shit old tennis raquet for his ultra-high tech piece of engineering, of course he's going to school me.
But your story doesn't in any way support your assertion that it's possible to be a dominating Magic player with less than $20. If you go and take a look at almost any tournament-caliber deck, you're simply not going to find that it contains cards whose aggregate value is less than $100, and $200 and $300 decks are more common. And while a few of them are under that, even around $70 in the case of the UG Mongrel deck that won the Louisville PTQ, I can guarantee you that the guy who played that deck spent *far* more than that amount to reach the level of proficiency to allow him to take a tournament with it.
Why? How is either question relevant to, well, anything?
Not having even one million dollars in the bank and not having even a single album in the Top 20 is far more typical an experience for a musician than being Britney Spears.
Oxidation is an increase in oxidation number. If a species increases in oxidation number, it has oxidized, regardless of whether or not oxygen was involved.
Take a portion of finely divided sodium metal. Spray some hot chlorine gas over it. You'll get an oxidation-reduction reaction. Like this:
2Na + Cl2 --> 2NaCl
Na's oxidation number goes from 0 to +1, so it's been oxidized. What did the oxidation? Well, there's no oxygen, so it must have been the chlorine. Chlorine therefore was an oxidizer in this reaction. The Cl went from 0 to -1, so it was reduced. This was a redox reaction.
Sodium is poison and explosive when combined with water.
Dammit.
Sodium (Na) and the sodium ion (Na+) are not the same thing. Salt is an ionic compound; when I dissolve it in water, I get water and a whole bunch of dissolved Na+ and Cl-. They're ions, which behave chemically in a fashion distinct from the full atom, which is why the glass of salt water doesn't explode and why I don't oxidize my esophagus if I drink it.
Best solar cells you're going to see in "field use" are around 20% efficiency. Let's call it 25%. Let's set insolation to a very favorable figure of 1300 W/m2; this is what it is at 1 AU from the sun, but doesn't take into account axial tilt, clouds, nighttime, that sort of thing, so it's pretty much a maximum value.
How many solar panels can you fold out of the trunk? 100 square meters seems like a reasonable size for how big the array could be and still be manageable. Let's also assume total efficency in the other aspects of the system; all energy the solar cells manage to turn into electricy eventually ends up moving the car.
With all these favorable numbers, we end up with 1300 J/s/m * 100 m2 * 7200 s *.25 = 234 MJ.
Merely to accelerate a 1,000kg car to 100km/h would take 784 kJ of this energy. I don't think you're getting 2 hours of driving time out of this array's charging the batteries for 2 hours unless the car in question is Matchbox.
This is an awful idea. Other posters have pointed out how this makes it far easier for viral and bacterial diseases to leap across the species barrier, but there's a good story about it that they may not know.
In The Coming Plague, Laurie Garrett recounts how the primate supply facility that supplied the baboon whose heart was transplanted into Baby Fae was horrified when they learned what was done with it. They had not known that the ape was to be used as a transplant donor, and would have refused had they know. Seems the ape in question was infected with cytomegalovirus, simian AIDS, and a variety of other diseases that generally don't infect humans, but might if you take the organ out of the ape and stick it in a person.
Later, she tells of a virus carried by a certain species of monkey. It's harmless to that monkey, but readily infects another species which shares habitat with the first. Upon infection, it causes a variety of leukemias and lymphomas so widespread and virulent that death frequently occurs in mere weeks.
And it's airborne.
Man, I'm not sure if any pigs carry anything even near so nasty, but I can't think of a worse thing to be doing. Research money spent for this purpose would be far, far better spent on learning how to grow fresh, healthy, transplantable human organs.
Re:Very Effective
on
Electric Armor
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· Score: 4, Insightful
1st rate armies dont us RPG's, the Russians sell them cheap but even they dont use them!
Bullshit. The RPG-7 is long in the tooth, but it and its successors like the RPG-18 are still perfectly capable infantry weapons, and are certainly effective against bunkers and the like even if you're nuts to fire one against an M1A2 in the frontal arc. They fulfill a role similar the the 84mm Carl Gustav, which rest assured is used by 1st-rate armies. Like the USMC, ferinstance.
Nobodt expects an RPG to knock out a tank
Again, bullshit. Ask the Russians how many tanks they lost to RPGs in Chechnya; the number's a good deal higher than they'd have liked. The Chechyns would form anti-tank teams of three or four men, each with an MG gunner, a sniper, and a RPG gunner or two. They'd gang up, 5 teams to a tank, and they'd launch from basement or upper-floor windows. The MG was there to suppress the infantry accompanying the tank, the sniper was there to either just pop the TC or make the tank button up, and then the RPG gunners would start taking shots at the top, rear, or sides of the tank.
They killed quite a few T-80s, last I heard.
They are really only used against APC's which I believe serve no purpose to begin with
Bullshit for a third time. If APCs and IFVs serve no purpose, I can't help but wonder why they're such a large part of modern armored forces and doctrine.
Sounds like these tanks could benefit from a quick reacting Phalanx gatling gun to serve as anti-missile defense
The Russians are well ahead of you, there. ARENA is an active missile defense system mounted on some T-80 and later series tanks. It consists of a radar mast mounted on the back of the turret, and a line of of explosive charges arranged around the perimeter of the turret. The radar detects the ATGM, and the appropriate explosive charge is detonated at the appropriate time to hopefully destroy the incoming ATGM with the shrapnel. There's another similar system, Drozd, which uses two radar antenna and an array of 8 small rockets to similar effect.
though I have no idea what the optimal flight times of Dragons and TOWs are.
Quite a few seconds at the longer ranges. RPGs are actually more problematic here, since a guy can pop up from a pile of rubble less than 100 yards away and flip one off at you, but wire-guided ATGMs have a longer minimum range, and generally don't work to well in environments where there's lots of stuff laying around to snag and sever the control wires (like, say, urban battlefields).
but any non-ferrous weapon would negate that
Nope. Copper is commonly used at a HEAT round liner, and it's quite non-ferrous. What matters is that it's conductive.
Re:Very Effective
on
Electric Armor
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· Score: 3, Informative
Okay, here's how HEAT rounds work.
You've got a shaped charge of HE surrounding a metal liner that's usually copper. In this picture, you can clearly see the copper liner surrounded by the shaped charge.
When the HE blows, it turns the metal liner into a slug traveling at mind-boggling velocities. This slug is what penetrates the armor.
To replace the liner with a non-conductive material is easier said than done, since the non-conductive material will have to behave similarly enough to a metal to deform appropriately when the shaped charge blows; a ceramic probably won't do the trick. It will also have to be dense enough to matter; polystyrene probably won't do the trick.
And finally, there's a tremendous amount of surplus RPGs floating around. Nullifying those as a threat is a good idea, even if armsmakers develop new kinds in the future.
You have to do more than pierce the outer plate. Basically, the outer plate is charged, and the inner surface is grounded. The cap only discharges when something bridges the plates. 'course, if something doesn't bridge the plates, then it didn't penetrate and you're safe anyway.
Tank crews tend to retain their hearing after being in a tank that's impacted by enemy fire; an APC crew shouldn't have a significantly worse experience, assuming they're not dead or otherwise shredded by spalling.
Re:Old idea with problems.. but promising..
on
Going Up?
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· Score: 2
This got modded up as interesting?
New York City's population is about 8,000,000 people. Let's assume that every person on earth generates as much waste as the average New Yorker, which is probably being overly favorable to your argument. The 6 billion people on the planet right now therefore dump out 750*13,000 tons each day, for a total annual trashload of 3,558,750,000.
5.98E24/3.56E9 = 1.68E15 years. For the notation-impaired, that's 1.68 million billion years. That's about 1.68 billion times as long as humans have even been around. It's absoulutely asinine that you'd use this even as an example.
Go ahead, if you want to. Add Yucca Mountain's 77,000 metric tons of waste and 100,000,000 gallons of radioactive waste water; you're not even up into significant figures. And the piddling effect you speak of is absolutely dwarfed by the slowing caused by the tidal influence of the moon. Even increased waste production due to increasing population can probably be ignored, since it's never going to go Malthusian and will probably reach sustainment levels sometime this century.
And hey, if it goes Malthusian, longer days are the least of anyone's worries.
Lastly, I'd suggest that nobody's going to be launching garbage into space. First of all, this just gets you up out of the gravity well, not out of orbit, so you'll still need to burn if you don't want to come back down to Earth again in the near future. Second of all, if the ecological doomsayers are right and civilization's going to starve itself because of its own environmental depradations, well, we don't want to be getting rid of our trash; it's too damned valuable to send into deep space.
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My argument is that without copyrights, goods that cost money won't get produced to begin with.
Which is why until the advent of modern copyright law, nobody was producing any goods that cost money?
Similarly, it is assumed that if you have a public wireless network, you invite the public to use it to a reasonable extent.
Okay, that's a more-or-less reasonable argument: that in the absence of a sign saying "Hands off!", you can assume tacit permission has been granted to use some of those resources.
I don't agree. If you can take network resources by that argument, why not tap into the building's electrical service and grab a few spare amperes? Clearly, if you applied that argument to the building's electricity, or its water service, or the gasoline in your neighbor's car, nobody would buy it. I'm not sure why it's suddenly a valid argument when applied to bandwidth.
But it's at least something that can be argued: that by not denying permission, the owner has in effect granted permission. I was mainly taking exception to the ridiculous assertion that taking it when permission has been denied is not actually theft unless the owner notices the absence of the bandwidth he's paid for.
No, because you can't drive someone's car without making it worse in one way or another
That's one way an analogy breaks down, yes, but it doesn't change the fundamental fact that you are taking a finite and rival good from the legitimate owner. That is theft. Whatever amount of bandwidth you are using, however small, is a chunk that he is unable to use, despite the fact that he has paid for it.
If you steal only 1 slice of bread from a loaf I've purchased, you may not have significantly impeded my ability to make a sandwhich, but you've still deprive me of my rightful bread.
If someone pulls into my driveway in order to turn their car around, that's just fine with me.
That's nice of you. Of course, since it's your property, you'd be equally within your rights to say that it's not fine with you, and post signs to that effect and go after those who ignored it for trespassing upon your property.
Additionally, taking someone's car is stealing -- you deprive them of the car. Using someone's bandwidth is likely not, unless you use so much that they can't get their work done.
No, both are the same. Both cars and bandwidth are rival goods, existing in finite supply and useable by only a single individual at a time. Yes, you might say that if you're only using 10kbps of a 10mbps pipe, you're not using enough to seriously impact the guy who pays for that pipe, but you might just as well say that if you steal a guy's car while he's asleep and return it before he wakes up, you haven't really stolen it because you didn't impede his use.
The brain (lossily and selectively) records what the eyes see.
In other words, the brain doesn't do at all what a video camera pointed at a given area does, making a wealth of cameras blanketing an area quantitatively different from a bunch of people walking through that area intent on their daily tasks. That's probably part of the reason why eyewitness testimony about what happened in, say, a car accident isn't anywhere near so accurate as a videotape of the same incident.
Thanks for catching my entire point.
I'd feel you were stalking me
There are laws against such behavior, of course. What if, instead of following you around, I just arranged to have a bunch of video cameras placed in your path. Wouldn't that still be stalking?
Why should a corporation have a power that it's illegal for me to yield?
This isn't just watching; it's recording.
Yes, people can see you when you're walking about your daily business, but mutant superpowers aside, they're not watching you intently and making a file of everywhere you visit and everything you do.
If every day when you left the house, I started following you with a digital video camera and stopped only when you returned home, I'd just bet that you'd feel I was invading your privacy.
Unless you're some sort of exhibitionist freak, of course.
What *were* the losses due to?
Mechanical failures or accidents.
And I bet that huge killer lasers are a lot more environmentall friendly than the current nasty chemicals used in conventional weapons.
Huge killer lasers that use a chemical reaction to pump the beam generate some horrifically nasty chemical byproducts. Take a COIL, a chemical oxygen-iodine laser. You don't want to breathe, ingest, or even look too hard at what's leftover when one of those fires.
How much damage can you do with 67 hairdryers?
Depends. Take all the energy dissipated by those hairdryers in, say, 1 second, cram it into a pulse lasting, oh, say, a microsecond, and you're dumping a lot of power. That sort of power will happily break things.
Or, to put it another way: 100 kilowatts, isn't that like 135 horsepower? How much damage can you do with 135 horsepower? Try driving a Ford Festiva into a bridge abutment at 70 miles per hour, and you'll find out.
I guess their strategy was to assume that they could outrun any danger.
There was no assumption about it; that's specifically what it was designed to do. The SR-72 could, outrun any danger, and probably still could today. When it's going into hostile airspace, it's running flat out at over Mach 3, and at very high altitudes of over 80,000 feet.
Even if the plane you're trying to intercept it with can go that high, that's a hella difficult intercept geometry. Even for SAMs, which can travel at high Mach numbers, that's a hella difficult intercept geometry.
Over 4,000 missiles have been fired at SR-71s over the years. Not one SR-71 was ever lost due to enemy fire.
Assume, my ass. And really, let's face it; if you take a missile hit at Mach 3 and angels 80, the design of your fuel tanks is not going to make a bit of a difference, because the aerodynamic forces are going to rip the plane to shreds faster than you can say "Challenger."
The fuel wasn't cryogenic, either. STP when it went into the tanks.
It used a hydrocarbon fuel not very different from kerosene.
Very different from kerosene. Most military jet aircraft run on JP-5 or JP-8, which are essentially aviation kerosenes.
The SR-71 runs on JP-7. JP-7 is a more viscous fuel with a low vapor pressure and a very high flashpoint. So high, in fact, that the SR-71 can't start its own engines. To light the fires on a Blackbird takes a chemical ignition system, where the ground crew squirts a measure of tetraethylborane into the engines. TEB is actually hypergolic with JP-7, and the resultant explosion starts the engines.
The airframe heats up to 1000 degrees F in high mach flight, and so it has to be built to fit together nice at the higher temperature. When it's on the ground and cool, it does indeed leak fuel like a sieve. And yes, they do pump fuel from tank to tank in flight to cool hot spots.
Dear lord, what a plane. 5.2 thrust-to-weight ratio. 3200km/h. 85,000 ft ceiling. 1100 C inlet temperatures. 2000 degree combustion exhaust. Has successfully evaded over 4,000 SAMs.
Like, wow.
No one but me has the right to copy something I own the copyright to--or charge for that right.
Really?
Explain the existence of compulsory licenses then.
That's all very nice. It's not particularly interesting to point out that a talented player of any game, even with mediocre equipment, will beat out a neophyte who spends more money on equipment. If I trade Andre Agassi my beat-to-shit old tennis raquet for his ultra-high tech piece of engineering, of course he's going to school me.
But your story doesn't in any way support your assertion that it's possible to be a dominating Magic player with less than $20. If you go and take a look at almost any tournament-caliber deck, you're simply not going to find that it contains cards whose aggregate value is less than $100, and $200 and $300 decks are more common. And while a few of them are under that, even around $70 in the case of the UG Mongrel deck that won the Louisville PTQ, I can guarantee you that the guy who played that deck spent *far* more than that amount to reach the level of proficiency to allow him to take a tournament with it.
Why? How is either question relevant to, well, anything?
Not having even one million dollars in the bank and not having even a single album in the Top 20 is far more typical an experience for a musician than being Britney Spears.
Wow. That's so incorrect, it's not even wrong.
Oxidation is an increase in oxidation number. If a species increases in oxidation number, it has oxidized, regardless of whether or not oxygen was involved.
Take a portion of finely divided sodium metal. Spray some hot chlorine gas over it. You'll get an oxidation-reduction reaction. Like this:
2Na + Cl2 --> 2NaCl
Na's oxidation number goes from 0 to +1, so it's been oxidized. What did the oxidation? Well, there's no oxygen, so it must have been the chlorine. Chlorine therefore was an oxidizer in this reaction. The Cl went from 0 to -1, so it was reduced. This was a redox reaction.
It involved no oxygen. Sheesh.
Sodium is poison and explosive when combined with water.
Dammit.
Sodium (Na) and the sodium ion (Na+) are not the same thing. Salt is an ionic compound; when I dissolve it in water, I get water and a whole bunch of dissolved Na+ and Cl-. They're ions, which behave chemically in a fashion distinct from the full atom, which is why the glass of salt water doesn't explode and why I don't oxidize my esophagus if I drink it.
You're forgetting about things like friction. Accelerating to 100kmh doesn't mean you *stay* at 100kmh, unless you're driving to the Moon.
Hmmm.
.25 = 234 MJ.
Best solar cells you're going to see in "field use" are around 20% efficiency. Let's call it 25%. Let's set insolation to a very favorable figure of 1300 W/m2; this is what it is at 1 AU from the sun, but doesn't take into account axial tilt, clouds, nighttime, that sort of thing, so it's pretty much a maximum value.
How many solar panels can you fold out of the trunk? 100 square meters seems like a reasonable size for how big the array could be and still be manageable. Let's also assume total efficency in the other aspects of the system; all energy the solar cells manage to turn into electricy eventually ends up moving the car.
With all these favorable numbers, we end up with 1300 J/s/m * 100 m2 * 7200 s *
Merely to accelerate a 1,000kg car to 100km/h would take 784 kJ of this energy. I don't think you're getting 2 hours of driving time out of this array's charging the batteries for 2 hours unless the car in question is Matchbox.
This is an awful idea. Other posters have pointed out how this makes it far easier for viral and bacterial diseases to leap across the species barrier, but there's a good story about it that they may not know.
In The Coming Plague , Laurie Garrett recounts how the primate supply facility that supplied the baboon whose heart was transplanted into Baby Fae was horrified when they learned what was done with it. They had not known that the ape was to be used as a transplant donor, and would have refused had they know. Seems the ape in question was infected with cytomegalovirus, simian AIDS, and a variety of other diseases that generally don't infect humans, but might if you take the organ out of the ape and stick it in a person.
Later, she tells of a virus carried by a certain species of monkey. It's harmless to that monkey, but readily infects another species which shares habitat with the first. Upon infection, it causes a variety of leukemias and lymphomas so widespread and virulent that death frequently occurs in mere weeks.
And it's airborne.
Man, I'm not sure if any pigs carry anything even near so nasty, but I can't think of a worse thing to be doing. Research money spent for this purpose would be far, far better spent on learning how to grow fresh, healthy, transplantable human organs.
1st rate armies dont us RPG's, the Russians sell them cheap but even they dont use them!
Bullshit. The RPG-7 is long in the tooth, but it and its successors like the RPG-18 are still perfectly capable infantry weapons, and are certainly effective against bunkers and the like even if you're nuts to fire one against an M1A2 in the frontal arc. They fulfill a role similar the the 84mm Carl Gustav, which rest assured is used by 1st-rate armies. Like the USMC, ferinstance.
Nobodt expects an RPG to knock out a tank
Again, bullshit. Ask the Russians how many tanks they lost to RPGs in Chechnya; the number's a good deal higher than they'd have liked. The Chechyns would form anti-tank teams of three or four men, each with an MG gunner, a sniper, and a RPG gunner or two. They'd gang up, 5 teams to a tank, and they'd launch from basement or upper-floor windows. The MG was there to suppress the infantry accompanying the tank, the sniper was there to either just pop the TC or make the tank button up, and then the RPG gunners would start taking shots at the top, rear, or sides of the tank.
They killed quite a few T-80s, last I heard.
They are really only used against APC's which I believe serve no purpose to begin with
Bullshit for a third time. If APCs and IFVs serve no purpose, I can't help but wonder why they're such a large part of modern armored forces and doctrine.
Sounds like these tanks could benefit from a quick reacting Phalanx gatling gun to serve as anti-missile defense
The Russians are well ahead of you, there. ARENA is an active missile defense system mounted on some T-80 and later series tanks. It consists of a radar mast mounted on the back of the turret, and a line of of explosive charges arranged around the perimeter of the turret. The radar detects the ATGM, and the appropriate explosive charge is detonated at the appropriate time to hopefully destroy the incoming ATGM with the shrapnel. There's another similar system, Drozd, which uses two radar antenna and an array of 8 small rockets to similar effect.
though I have no idea what the optimal flight times of Dragons and TOWs are.
Quite a few seconds at the longer ranges. RPGs are actually more problematic here, since a guy can pop up from a pile of rubble less than 100 yards away and flip one off at you, but wire-guided ATGMs have a longer minimum range, and generally don't work to well in environments where there's lots of stuff laying around to snag and sever the control wires (like, say, urban battlefields).
but any non-ferrous weapon would negate that
Nope. Copper is commonly used at a HEAT round liner, and it's quite non-ferrous. What matters is that it's conductive.
Okay, here's how HEAT rounds work.
You've got a shaped charge of HE surrounding a metal liner that's usually copper. In this picture, you can clearly see the copper liner surrounded by the shaped charge.
When the HE blows, it turns the metal liner into a slug traveling at mind-boggling velocities. This slug is what penetrates the armor.
To replace the liner with a non-conductive material is easier said than done, since the non-conductive material will have to behave similarly enough to a metal to deform appropriately when the shaped charge blows; a ceramic probably won't do the trick. It will also have to be dense enough to matter; polystyrene probably won't do the trick.
And finally, there's a tremendous amount of surplus RPGs floating around. Nullifying those as a threat is a good idea, even if armsmakers develop new kinds in the future.
Kontakt-5 ERA is reportedly capable of defeating modern long-rod penetrators.
You have to do more than pierce the outer plate. Basically, the outer plate is charged, and the inner surface is grounded. The cap only discharges when something bridges the plates. 'course, if something doesn't bridge the plates, then it didn't penetrate and you're safe anyway.
Tank crews tend to retain their hearing after being in a tank that's impacted by enemy fire; an APC crew shouldn't have a significantly worse experience, assuming they're not dead or otherwise shredded by spalling.
This got modded up as interesting?
New York City's population is about 8,000,000 people. Let's assume that every person on earth generates as much waste as the average New Yorker, which is probably being overly favorable to your argument. The 6 billion people on the planet right now therefore dump out 750*13,000 tons each day, for a total annual trashload of 3,558,750,000.
5.98E24/3.56E9 = 1.68E15 years. For the notation-impaired, that's 1.68 million billion years. That's about 1.68 billion times as long as humans have even been around. It's absoulutely asinine that you'd use this even as an example.
Go ahead, if you want to. Add Yucca Mountain's 77,000 metric tons of waste and 100,000,000 gallons of radioactive waste water; you're not even up into significant figures. And the piddling effect you speak of is absolutely dwarfed by the slowing caused by the tidal influence of the moon. Even increased waste production due to increasing population can probably be ignored, since it's never going to go Malthusian and will probably reach sustainment levels sometime this century.
And hey, if it goes Malthusian, longer days are the least of anyone's worries.
Lastly, I'd suggest that nobody's going to be launching garbage into space. First of all, this just gets you up out of the gravity well, not out of orbit, so you'll still need to burn if you don't want to come back down to Earth again in the near future. Second of all, if the ecological doomsayers are right and civilization's going to starve itself because of its own environmental depradations, well, we don't want to be getting rid of our trash; it's too damned valuable to send into deep space.
Especially the stuff at Yucca Mountain.