Well, let's say the beam will be 20 feet wide at that distance. I think it's reasonable to assume that the area of the cockpit that needs to be covered is 10 feet wide. Covering a 10ft target with a 20ft beam is identical to covering a 5mm target with a 10mm beam, so the required precision quoted by the original poster will remain the same
What??? The ratio of beam/target sizes are the same. That has nothing to do with the precision needed. You are shooting at a target 2 miles away from you. In the original poster's quote, if your aim is off by more than just 5 mm in any direction you miss the target. With the numbers you just gave you could be off center by up to 10 feet and still hit it. That's a HUGE difference in precision.
GE is hardly the only maker of high power lasers. There are many in the world. You can also build your own if you want to put the effort into it.
Sorry if you don't like the sniper stuff. It was an extreme to make the point. One of the earlier posters in the thread 'dared' me to hold a laser beam on a basketball 1500 feet away. My point was that sharpshooters can hit a target that size at that distance with no problem.
Here are some sharpshooter contest results. Notice the nice groupings they can make in the 3" and 6" rings from 1000 yards away. With lasers and no windage/drop/grain-variation their accuracy would be even more phenominal.
Why the hell are you going to bother producing a one-of-a-kind "laser rifle" that *MIGHT* blind a pilot when you could just shoot them with an actual rifle?
I dont want to build a super fancy one-of-a-kind laser rifle. I'm saying they could just take an industrial laser, mount one end on a bipod/tripod and mount a high power sniper scope on it. Not exactly the type of engineering you need NASA for. A good 'ol boy could do it in an afternoon if he could get his hands on a high power industrial laser.
Say you want to hit a 5mm target with a 10mm beam
But you don't want such a tiny beam, and you aren't aiming at such a tiny target.
You don't want a 10mm beam. You want a high power industrial laser that can put out a beam that will still temporarily blind somone when the beam is 5 feet wide. GE will be glad to sell you one powerful enough if you've got the bucks. And you won't be shining it at a 5mm target (the pupil of one eye of one pilot). You will be bathing the whole cockpit with that 5 foot wide beam so that you get both eyes of the pilot, and both eyes of the copilot. The cockpit is a lot bigger than 5 mm.
Now do the math and compare that to a sniper hitting a 12 inch wide target with a.50 caliber bullet at a miles distance. Realise also that the laser won't have probems with windage, drop of the bullet due to gravity, or variations in speed of the bullet by how many grains of gunpower are packed into the cartridge. No NASA boys required. Just a good sharpshooter.
You certainly aren't going to be 252 meters off each second at the angle you are at. You aren't aiming at a plane directly overhead. You are aiming at one a long distance away that is coming toward you.
Besides that, the plane in Cleveland probably wasn't going anywhere near 565 mph. It was 14 miles from the airport and likely slowing in the more crowded airspace and preparing for landing. It it was also probably on a slow descent for landing. Once again decreasing the angle of change that the bad guys had to use.
You can probably smuggle an industrial laser easier than you can a ground to air rocket launcher. A piece of industrial hardware looks like it will be used for... some industrial thing. A rocket launcher kind of stands out more to border inspectors.
When the terrorist launches the rocket in a cloud of smoke noise with a warhead shooting into the sky, someone is also likely to see them launch it and they would very likely be caught. If someone sees you point bulky industrial thing up in one end they probably aren't going to think a lot of it. I doubt the FBI gets a call every time someone is seen working with bulky equipment.
Since neither of us know the type of laser used, we don't know what the beam spread would be at several miles distance. Nor do we know the power output of the laser, so neither of us can tell how intense it would be at that distance.
I wouldn't want to stare straight into a 4000W industrial laser even if I was 5 miles away and it's beem was 5' wide. At 5 feet wide that beam is going to be about as intense as a 15mW laser beam thats.25 inches wide. Ever stare stright into a laser pointer for 10 seconds or so? You might have a rough time seeing for the next few minutes.
Remember, you don't have to permanantly damage the pilots eyes, you just have to temporarily blind him. Even being blind for just a few minutes could be terrible if he was coming in for a landing, or in an area with a lot of other air traffic. Ever have an especially bright flashbulb go off in your face? It won't do any permanent damage, but it can certainly make things hard to see for a minutes or two. Especially at night when your eyes need to be attuned to a darker environment.
2,430 metres. Ok, so it's only been done once at that distance but think...
The distance away these bad guys that had the laser were was probably 10x what the sniper was. But the sniper shot a man. The laser only had to hit the cockpit which probably has 10x the cross section of a man. No difference there. Even so far.
The sniper had to worry about wind. Wind for over a miles distance, even if it's light at the near end, a breeze could be kicking up at the far end. Then there's the drop of the bullet from gravity over that distance. Lots of problems that all go away when you are talking about lasers, so the laser shot is a *LOT* easier.
The sniper had to hit the target with a (relatively) tiny.50 caliber bullet. The laser beam was probably very wide after traveling several miles. I dont' know what kind of laser was used, but one poster mentioned ' my 2.5' long argon tube beam ends up 1' or more wide at a distance of only 1000 feet or so.' The beam of whatever kind of laser it was could have been extremely wide after several miles.
Much easier to hit the target.
The plane was moving, but at several miles away, if it was moving directly (or close to) at the laser, the number of arc seconds it would move relative to the bad guys would be very few in only 10 seconds or so. Somewhat harder to hit the target, but very doable.
I'm assuming the laser used was a large one, not some little pencil laser. A large one could easily be set up on a bipod or tripod mount (think of rifles or large caliber guns on mounts). Sharpshooters can hit things at extreme distance when their guns are properly braced. Snipers have taken out individual people with bullets at well over a miles distance. The cockpit is a lot larger target than a single human, plus at several miles the laser beam is going to spread a lot and be a LOT wider than a bullet.
Ever look at a plane several miles away that is coming straight or almost straight in your direction? Sometimes it seems like they aren't moving at all. The number of arc seconds they will move in 10 seconds time relative to you is very small. I don't think a gyroscope/mechanical tracker would be necessary.
They didn't shine it at a plane directly overhead, the pointed it at a plane a few miles away. At that distance, even at an altitude of a few thousand feet, the pilots still have a clear line of site to the ground. The could be hit much closer if the incoming beam was slighly angled to come in from the front side and not straight ahead over the center of the nose.
Could they combine the two? Sure. And you could add on a peltier device to also take away that heat.
Why isn't it practical? You have to add a lot of weight for each different component. Plus there are now lots more parts to potentially break. That last bit is the part that is soon going to bit the new hybrid car owners in the ass. The stats are just now starting to roll in about how much less reliable hybrids are...
They have all the same parts of a regular gasoline car. Plus they have all the electric motors and gear for braking-energy-recovery, etc. It should be no shock to anyone that they are going to have more broken parts than a regular car.
But does it make it right that these organizations that are accusing people of "piracy" are also trying to destroy the one decision that makes legal backups possible of any media content you have (books, CD's, VHS, records, tapes, anything). Betamax decision
I think the backup issues is an entirely different arguement. I think that people should definitely be allowed to make backups of their media for their own use.
The people the RIAA/MPAA are going after didn't just make backups of their CDs in case they scratched the original, they were distributing the copywrited work on the internet. Two entirely different things.
if they were truly losing money, a hell of a lot more people would be out of a job...
It doesn't matter a bit if they are making or losing money. They have a right to charge whatever they want for the art they produce. You have the right to purchase it or not purchase it at that price. You don't have a right to just take it because you don't like their price.
Let us remember those individuals who stood up for themselves, and their actions truly protraying the disillusion of the rights of the common citizen of the world.
The great men of history were not thieves. Martain Luther King was not a pirate. Stop trying to pretend your cause and theirs are linked.
I will agree with you that the copywrite is being extended far too long. It shouldn't be a perpetual thing as it is moving toward, but it should be long enough to let the creator profit from their creation. Where the balance is between those two is a debatable point.
The grandparent however, seemed to think pirating is fine because he just didn't feel like paying the asking price for the entertainment. That is what I think is wrong. Trying to find a good balance in expiration time of the copywrite is something I think he and the rest of us should put our efforts toward.
Oh please. If you need *intellectual food", they've got more than you could ever consume, available for free from your local public library. Once again, deal with it.
You mean 90% of the population lives within 100 miles of "a" coast. (Do you even have a source for that stat to back that up?)
If the asteroid hit in the mid Pacific, it wouldn't cause a mile high tsunami in the Atlantic. People 10 miles inland from a the coast of the Atlantic will be fine (well, as fine as anyone will be with the aftermath of that thing hitting the planet).
And exactly why should they limit the profits? If someone wants to spend $1,000,000 for a ticket to see a two hour movie, I'd consider it insane, but it would be their choice to make. Why should they be regulated on how much they can charge for the entertainment they produce?
It's entertainment. It's not food or some basic utility (electricity, etc). You don't *need* to see any movie. If you want some entertainment you go see whatever you find entertaining that you can find for a price you think is reasonable. Don't want to spend $7 for a movie ticket? Don't. You don't NEED to see it. And you don't have a RIGHT to see it at some price you consider reasonable. Get over it.
Yes, most military do use rounds, but they just want to get down quickly and safely to start fighting, they aren't trying to do it for 'fun' like the hobbiests, or do 'tricks' like we see in the movies.
There are some military folks (Navy SEALS, etc) who do use rectangular parachutes though (those that do HALO jumps, etc, and are after pinpoint targets, etc).
Like the grandparent said, we've been watching these things in the movies for the last 30 years. The average-joe knows good and well that they are more capable than the round ones most often seen only in World War II movies.
By "off the line", I believe the grandparent meant acceleration from a standstill.
You missed part of what he said, "it's not the engine that's limiting acceleration, it's the tires." The tires are a big difference between the hybrids you see on the road and what come on a muscle car.
Hybrids generally have very narrow tires? Why? Where the tire meets the road you get friction. Friction is very bad for fuel economy. Hence hybrids will be outfitted with narrow tires to reduce that fuel-robbing friction.
The problem is that during rapid acceleration, you want friction (also called traction) to allow the tires to grip the road firmly so that your energy is spent moving the car forward, not spinning the tires furiously while standing still. Both cars have enough power to make the tires break free and spin (bad), but the muscle car is generally going to come with much wider tires precisely because of that. To allow for more friction which will allow the tires to grab, and that power to be applied to accelerate the car instead (good). It kills their fuel mileage, but that sucks to start with, that's not the purpose of a muscle car.
Higher power to weight ratio (all else being equal) = higher acceleration. The thing is, that all other things aren't going to be equal. Hybrids and muscle cars are built for different purposes and have more differences than just power and weight. They have differences in tire sizes, compounds, etc.
Now, as soon as I can afford one, I want to get a Lotus Elise. The best of both worlds to me. The car is quick, but because it only weighs ~1900 lbs, it gets ~38 MPG. Not bad for a high performance sports car. And it comes with nice wide tires for fast acceleration and sticking in the corners.
For instance, the OpenBSD project folks place a lot of importance on the licensing of software. They won't use any 2.0 series Apache software. The 1.x series has a much more open license. In the 2.x series they added other specific requirements about certain patent termination cases, etc. That makes it not entirely GPL/BSD compatible.
Alternatively if you don't require the obit check, what if you are kidnapped and only released weeks/months later? Or get sick or in an accident and are in an extended coma?
And it's real easy to turn off ActiveX or have IE ask you before it runs any ActiveX stuff. That's how I run it. But then I'm paranoid and even have it ask me before it installs any cookies. IE can be run safely, if you are willing to run it that way. Just adjust the security settings to your level of paranoia.
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What??? The ratio of beam/target sizes are the same. That has nothing to do with the precision needed. You are shooting at a target 2 miles away from you. In the original poster's quote, if your aim is off by more than just 5 mm in any direction you miss the target. With the numbers you just gave you could be off center by up to 10 feet and still hit it. That's a HUGE difference in precision.
GE is hardly the only maker of high power lasers. There are many in the world. You can also build your own if you want to put the effort into it.
Sorry if you don't like the sniper stuff. It was an extreme to make the point. One of the earlier posters in the thread 'dared' me to hold a laser beam on a basketball 1500 feet away. My point was that sharpshooters can hit a target that size at that distance with no problem. Here are some sharpshooter contest results. Notice the nice groupings they can make in the 3" and 6" rings from 1000 yards away. With lasers and no windage/drop/grain-variation their accuracy would be even more phenominal.
Here's one that's 150W instead of 150mW. 1000x as powerful. More than enough power to overcome that 1/457 power loss from divergence.
I dont want to build a super fancy one-of-a-kind laser rifle. I'm saying they could just take an industrial laser, mount one end on a bipod/tripod and mount a high power sniper scope on it. Not exactly the type of engineering you need NASA for. A good 'ol boy could do it in an afternoon if he could get his hands on a high power industrial laser.
Say you want to hit a 5mm target with a 10mm beam
But you don't want such a tiny beam, and you aren't aiming at such a tiny target.
You don't want a 10mm beam. You want a high power industrial laser that can put out a beam that will still temporarily blind somone when the beam is 5 feet wide. GE will be glad to sell you one powerful enough if you've got the bucks. And you won't be shining it at a 5mm target (the pupil of one eye of one pilot). You will be bathing the whole cockpit with that 5 foot wide beam so that you get both eyes of the pilot, and both eyes of the copilot. The cockpit is a lot bigger than 5 mm.
Now do the math and compare that to a sniper hitting a 12 inch wide target with a .50 caliber bullet at a miles distance. Realise also that the laser won't have probems with windage, drop of the bullet due to gravity, or variations in speed of the bullet by how many grains of gunpower are packed into the cartridge. No NASA boys required. Just a good sharpshooter.
Besides that, the plane in Cleveland probably wasn't going anywhere near 565 mph. It was 14 miles from the airport and likely slowing in the more crowded airspace and preparing for landing. It it was also probably on a slow descent for landing. Once again decreasing the angle of change that the bad guys had to use.
You can probably smuggle an industrial laser easier than you can a ground to air rocket launcher. A piece of industrial hardware looks like it will be used for... some industrial thing. A rocket launcher kind of stands out more to border inspectors.
When the terrorist launches the rocket in a cloud of smoke noise with a warhead shooting into the sky, someone is also likely to see them launch it and they would very likely be caught. If someone sees you point bulky industrial thing up in one end they probably aren't going to think a lot of it. I doubt the FBI gets a call every time someone is seen working with bulky equipment.
I wouldn't want to stare straight into a 4000W industrial laser even if I was 5 miles away and it's beem was 5' wide. At 5 feet wide that beam is going to be about as intense as a 15mW laser beam thats .25 inches wide. Ever stare stright into a laser pointer for 10 seconds or so? You might have a rough time seeing for the next few minutes.
Remember, you don't have to permanantly damage the pilots eyes, you just have to temporarily blind him. Even being blind for just a few minutes could be terrible if he was coming in for a landing, or in an area with a lot of other air traffic. Ever have an especially bright flashbulb go off in your face? It won't do any permanent damage, but it can certainly make things hard to see for a minutes or two. Especially at night when your eyes need to be attuned to a darker environment.
http://www.snipercountry.com/Articles/KillingShot_ 2430Metres.asp
2,430 metres. Ok, so it's only been done once at that distance but think...
The distance away these bad guys that had the laser were was probably 10x what the sniper was. But the sniper shot a man. The laser only had to hit the cockpit which probably has 10x the cross section of a man. No difference there. Even so far.
The sniper had to worry about wind. Wind for over a miles distance, even if it's light at the near end, a breeze could be kicking up at the far end. Then there's the drop of the bullet from gravity over that distance. Lots of problems that all go away when you are talking about lasers, so the laser shot is a *LOT* easier.
The sniper had to hit the target with a (relatively) tiny .50 caliber bullet. The laser beam was probably very wide after traveling several miles. I dont' know what kind of laser was used, but one poster mentioned ' my 2.5' long argon tube beam ends up 1' or more wide at a distance of only 1000 feet or so.' The beam of whatever kind of laser it was could have been extremely wide after several miles.
Much easier to hit the target.
The plane was moving, but at several miles away, if it was moving directly (or close to) at the laser, the number of arc seconds it would move relative to the bad guys would be very few in only 10 seconds or so. Somewhat harder to hit the target, but very doable.
Ever look at a plane several miles away that is coming straight or almost straight in your direction? Sometimes it seems like they aren't moving at all. The number of arc seconds they will move in 10 seconds time relative to you is very small. I don't think a gyroscope/mechanical tracker would be necessary.
They didn't shine it at a plane directly overhead, the pointed it at a plane a few miles away. At that distance, even at an altitude of a few thousand feet, the pilots still have a clear line of site to the ground. The could be hit much closer if the incoming beam was slighly angled to come in from the front side and not straight ahead over the center of the nose.
I don't think they would evacuate an island (making it insanely easy to capture for our use as a military base) just because we asked.
I understand your idea and agree in principal it would have been nice, but I don't think it would have been practical to do in a war setting.
Why isn't it practical? You have to add a lot of weight for each different component. Plus there are now lots more parts to potentially break. That last bit is the part that is soon going to bit the new hybrid car owners in the ass. The stats are just now starting to roll in about how much less reliable hybrids are...
http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2004-07-25-hyb rid_x.htm
They have all the same parts of a regular gasoline car. Plus they have all the electric motors and gear for braking-energy-recovery, etc. It should be no shock to anyone that they are going to have more broken parts than a regular car.
I think the backup issues is an entirely different arguement. I think that people should definitely be allowed to make backups of their media for their own use.
The people the RIAA/MPAA are going after didn't just make backups of their CDs in case they scratched the original, they were distributing the copywrited work on the internet. Two entirely different things.
if they were truly losing money, a hell of a lot more people would be out of a job...
It doesn't matter a bit if they are making or losing money. They have a right to charge whatever they want for the art they produce. You have the right to purchase it or not purchase it at that price. You don't have a right to just take it because you don't like their price.
Let us remember those individuals who stood up for themselves, and their actions truly protraying the disillusion of the rights of the common citizen of the world.
The great men of history were not thieves. Martain Luther King was not a pirate. Stop trying to pretend your cause and theirs are linked.
The grandparent however, seemed to think pirating is fine because he just didn't feel like paying the asking price for the entertainment. That is what I think is wrong. Trying to find a good balance in expiration time of the copywrite is something I think he and the rest of us should put our efforts toward.
Oh please. If you need *intellectual food", they've got more than you could ever consume, available for free from your local public library. Once again, deal with it.
Any idea how long a 80 gig hard drive will run on 4 AA batteries?
If the asteroid hit in the mid Pacific, it wouldn't cause a mile high tsunami in the Atlantic. People 10 miles inland from a the coast of the Atlantic will be fine (well, as fine as anyone will be with the aftermath of that thing hitting the planet).
It's entertainment. It's not food or some basic utility (electricity, etc). You don't *need* to see any movie. If you want some entertainment you go see whatever you find entertaining that you can find for a price you think is reasonable. Don't want to spend $7 for a movie ticket? Don't. You don't NEED to see it. And you don't have a RIGHT to see it at some price you consider reasonable. Get over it.
There are some military folks (Navy SEALS, etc) who do use rectangular parachutes though (those that do HALO jumps, etc, and are after pinpoint targets, etc).
http://www.parachutehistory.com/eng/drs.html
Like the grandparent said, we've been watching these things in the movies for the last 30 years. The average-joe knows good and well that they are more capable than the round ones most often seen only in World War II movies.
You missed part of what he said, "it's not the engine that's limiting acceleration, it's the tires." The tires are a big difference between the hybrids you see on the road and what come on a muscle car.
Hybrids generally have very narrow tires? Why? Where the tire meets the road you get friction. Friction is very bad for fuel economy. Hence hybrids will be outfitted with narrow tires to reduce that fuel-robbing friction.
The problem is that during rapid acceleration, you want friction (also called traction) to allow the tires to grip the road firmly so that your energy is spent moving the car forward, not spinning the tires furiously while standing still. Both cars have enough power to make the tires break free and spin (bad), but the muscle car is generally going to come with much wider tires precisely because of that. To allow for more friction which will allow the tires to grab, and that power to be applied to accelerate the car instead (good). It kills their fuel mileage, but that sucks to start with, that's not the purpose of a muscle car.
Higher power to weight ratio (all else being equal) = higher acceleration. The thing is, that all other things aren't going to be equal. Hybrids and muscle cars are built for different purposes and have more differences than just power and weight. They have differences in tire sizes, compounds, etc.
Now, as soon as I can afford one, I want to get a Lotus Elise. The best of both worlds to me. The car is quick, but because it only weighs ~1900 lbs, it gets ~38 MPG. Not bad for a high performance sports car. And it comes with nice wide tires for fast acceleration and sticking in the corners.
The graphics did live up to the hype. Your flashlight just wasn't powerful enough to see them.
Different conditions, differently equipped enemy. The M1A1 Abrams seemed to have survived pretty well in the last two Gulf Wars.
Didn't you see? It comes in two colors. Starry Blue and Ivory White. Yes, it does come as a beige box.
For instance, the OpenBSD project folks place a lot of importance on the licensing of software. They won't use any 2.0 series Apache software. The 1.x series has a much more open license. In the 2.x series they added other specific requirements about certain patent termination cases, etc. That makes it not entirely GPL/BSD compatible.
Alternatively if you don't require the obit check, what if you are kidnapped and only released weeks/months later? Or get sick or in an accident and are in an extended coma?
And it's real easy to turn off ActiveX or have IE ask you before it runs any ActiveX stuff. That's how I run it. But then I'm paranoid and even have it ask me before it installs any cookies. IE can be run safely, if you are willing to run it that way. Just adjust the security settings to your level of paranoia.