The carrying power of a 10-11 gram bat is indeed amazing, some 15-18 grams; the incendiary bomb was in this range (17.5 grams). Bats can carry such loads for miles. And bats with dummy bombs released in housed areas dragged the loads into sites highly favorable for fire-starting. We released bats successfully at various altitudes both from the B-2 S and from an open Attack Bomber, in which flying was great fun. The smoke bombs functioned satisfactorily and provided further information. Col. Epler and the Qther officers all favored a full-scale trial with live incendiaries to be injected for a 10-minute take-off just before release. I considered a live test highly hazardous and likely to lead to disclosure o£ the project. I also thought it unnecessary. But the officers insisted that a report to the CWS and AAF chiefs would be incomplete without it and so, on a Saturday, a live test was scheduled for the following Monday.
Everything went off on schedule, and shortly after dinner the bomber flew in loaded with shrieking, kicking bats. The airmen had taken delight in a form of hunting which consisted in swinging landing nets at the mouth of an inexhaustible cave, and the crates were all jam full. The crates were loaded into the truck and the refrigeration turned on full tilt. But the howling went on without abate for a couple of hours, and it became evident that the refrigerating unit was not adequate to cope with such a large amount of body heat all of a sudden. So we mounted a series of fans in positions to blow air in over cakes of ice. Finally, about midnight, the noise ceased; hibernation had been accomplished. A night watch of soldiers took over, and we turned in.
The next day the bats were still nicely quiet and we started a trial with the lightest of the dummy bombs. A first batch of bats in hibernation with weights attached was dumped out of the bomber at a low altitude, 2,000 ft. as I recall. The ground crew scurried around in jeeps and eventually located a group of free-fallers large enough to show that few if any of the bats had come out of hibernation. Other batches were released from higher and higher altitudes, which made reconnaissance increasingly difficult. Eventually it was clear that the bats were not in hibernation but dead. Our cooling had been too efficient, too sudden.
Imagine, then, a surprise attack on Tokyo in which a succession of bombers would operate at high altitude for about half an hour, say starting at midnight, each delivering a load of bat-bombs equivalent to some 3,700 fires. There would be no explosions or fire bursts to give warning, and the bombers would depart. With the activated mechanisms all set for a fourhour delay, bombs in strategic and not easily detectable locations would start popping all over the city at 4 a.m. An attractive picture? AU those working on the project thought so. Then, suddenly, X-ray was cancelled. I never learned the reason, but can make a guess. The bats would be vectors for bombs, but they would be vectors also for germs. Our side might be accused of initiating biological warfare. But the job was done very effectively by M-69s.
I wouldn't be surprised if we see a slew of products in the future where you're only licensed to use them until the warranty expires, first sale doctrine be damned. That, and the inclusion of DRM to disable them as soon as the warranty^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsubscription expires.
What? I've never owned one with a clear lid. They've always been solid metal. You don't typically make pressure vessels out of glass. You're thinking of a crock pot/slow cooker.
It's woefully inadequate for charging at acceptable rates. A good friend of mine drives an EV (a VW Golf) and the thing takes several hours to charge with a physical cable. The fastest level charging standard isn't even available nearby, and we have a pretty decent amount of charging stations here in MA.
Good. I'm glad someone has the balls to stand up and point out double standards--even if you don't agree with someone's views. Especially when you don't agree with someone's views.
Make a hollow propeller mounted on a pen tube, with a hole at each end of the prop (facing opposite directions, to drive the prop). Push pen tube through 2 liter bottle cap (loosely fitting in the hole), cut tube short, flare end to retain. Fill bottle with mentos and coke as usual and cap.
Might work, might not. Haven't tried it, but you could work out the bugs (bubbles?) pretty cheap.
Dump unoxidized carbon out the sides. Also, at hypersonic velocities, you're heating and dissociating the air by definition,which reduces the efficiency of the laser.
Saturation attacks. Since a laser can attack only one target at a time, requires several seconds to disable it, and several more seconds to be redirected to the next target, a laser can disable only so many targets within a given period of time. This places an upper limit on the ability of an individual laser to deal with saturation attacks—attacks by multiple weapons that approach the ship simultaneously or within a few seconds of one another. This limitation can be mitigated by installing more than one laser on the ship, similar to how the Navy installs multiple CIWS systems on certain ships.
Hardened targets and countermeasures. Less-powerful lasers—that is, lasers with beam powers measured in kilowatts (kW) rather than megawatts (MW) 10 — can have less effectiveness against targets that incorporate shielding, ablative material, or highly reflective surfaces, or that rotate rapidly (so that the laser spot does not remain continuously on a single location on the target’s surface) or tumble.
In order to facilitate comparison with the findings of other authors we chose to express the threshold fluence in units of pulse energy per unit area . The multipulse damage threshold for molybdenum at 1064 nm reported by Zhou [29] of 1 J/cm^2 for 10 ns pulses is rather higher than the value of the order of 0.3 J/cm^2 we find. Similarly, we find that stainless steel gets damaged at about 0.2 J/cm^2, whereas the value of 2.3 J/cm^2 for 120 ns pulses at 1064 nm found by Leontyev [30] would lead us to expect a threshold of around 0.4 J/cm^2 for 5 ns pulses.
Also, you're severely overestimating the reflectivity of materials likely to be exposed to the atmosphere, especially in battle conditions. 70% would be nice. They also discuss that, as well as how much short pulses at short wavelengths reduce the reflectivity (up to around ~25% in nitrogen, which air is largely composed of).
Your mirror would cease to be a mirror in very short order by either sheer ablation or the formation of oxides, reducing its ability to reflect, causing the absorption of more energy, at which point your mirror ablates. HTH.
Shifting the burden onto the taxpayers only pushes the majority of them further into the hole as the potholes continue to go unfixed and their beater car gets the shit beat out of it. After all, there's not much budget left for the massive amount of roadwork...
You grossly misunderstand. You wouldn't surround it with something, but stick a rocket on it (possibly two, like a spinning wheel firework) and accelerate it in the direction it's already spinning. No washing machine required, and the technology is almost simple as possible: anchor + rocket.
As for iron, you'd need to exceed the tensile strength+gravity of the material to begin with, which is already going to require an object spinning enormously fast. I DID say it was probably not feasible. It was just an amusing thought. Perhaps you should learn to read and separate serious suggestions from facetious ones.
Also, a nuke is highly unlikely to simply "evaporate" a large body. You might succeed in creating a cloud of large debris though, as plenty of objects are loosely held together to begin with.
Not quite what you suggested, but I had the amusing idea of spinning the thing up until it can't hold itself together. Probably not feasible and probably not a great idea if you don't manage to break it into small enough chunks...
The object is likely spinning. I'd want to eliminate the tether, which is huge point of failure. While static loading isn't as big an issue, shock loading IS a big problem, and it's unlikely we'll be able to entirely prevent it, or it will be prohibitively expensive in terms of mass (fuel for burns to slowly load the tether). Either way, you'll need to match the spin (i.e., orbit around) the object in order to eliminate the relative motion.
Also, I have no idea how much force you would need to perturb the orbit sufficiently. If you were still spinning, you would only be able to fire the engines for a portion of your orbit. You might actually use that to stop the spin, and then drag it higher/lower in its orbit. In any event, you would need the required force to be less than the maximum static load on your tether multiplied by the fraction of the time you can actually burn the engines.
IANAAE (I am not an aerospace engineer). You probably shouldn't actually try anything I suggest.
I am not the AC, and I don't know anything about raptor mortality WRT wind turbines, but a simple google got me this as the first link. (Search: altamont wind new vs old turbines)
Raptor Mortality at Altamont Pass (CA) - Reported raptor mortality at Altamont Pass (CA), has ranged from 0.05 to 0.10 fatalities per turbine per year (Erickson et al . 2001). Pre- construction raptor use is generally lower at other wind projects compared to the Altamont area. Approximately 50% of the turbines currently in operation at Altamont Pass (CA) (approximately 3,000 out of 5,400) are Kenetech 56-100 turbines equipped on 18 m lattice towers, with rotor diameters of 18 m, down-wind blades spinning at approximately 60 revolutions per minute (rpm), with tips within 9 meters of the ground. These turbines are located in a high density and clustered arrangement within the 60 mi 2 WRA. Recent studies suggest the 56-100 turbines may cause higher golden eagle mortality than other turbine types (Hunt 2002). The cause of the higher raptor mortality at Altamont is likely a combination of several factors including those listed above (turbine types and confi gurations), as well as raptor use of the area.
Data Used in This Analysis Erickson et al. (2001) recently summarized the operational fatality monitoring data available through the middle of 2001. This report contains a meta-analysis 1 that extends the Erickson et al. (2001) mortality summary to include both baseline data on avian and bat use 2, raptor nesting 3 , and operational avian and bat fatality monitoring data, including recently collected data at the Foote Creek Rim (WY), Stateline (OR/WA), Klondike (OR), and Buffalo Mountain (TN) wind plants. Over 30 study areas from 15 Wind Resource Areas (WRA) were used in at least one of the following components of this synthesis: avian mortality, avian use, raptor nesting, bat mortality and bat use.
Slashdot Mirror
Cute, and potentially deadly weapons of mass destruction! Note that your concern about germs has not gone unconsidered in history.
Excerpted from The Scientific Method by Louis Fieser:
The carrying power of a 10-11 gram bat is indeed amazing, some 15-18 grams; the incendiary bomb was in this range (17.5 grams). Bats can carry such loads for miles. And bats with dummy bombs released in housed areas dragged the loads into sites highly favorable for fire-starting. We released bats successfully at various altitudes both from the B-2 S and from an open Attack Bomber, in which flying was great fun. The smoke bombs functioned satisfactorily and provided further information. Col. Epler and the Qther officers all favored a full-scale trial with live incendiaries to be injected for a 10-minute take-off just before release. I considered a live test highly hazardous and likely to lead to disclosure o£ the project. I also thought it unnecessary. But the officers insisted that a report to the CWS and AAF chiefs would be incomplete without it and so, on a Saturday, a live test was scheduled for the following Monday.
Everything went off on schedule, and shortly after dinner the bomber flew in loaded with shrieking, kicking bats. The airmen had taken delight in a form of hunting which consisted in swinging landing nets at the mouth of an inexhaustible cave, and the crates were all jam full. The crates were loaded into the truck and the refrigeration turned on full tilt. But the howling went on without abate for a couple of hours, and it became evident that the refrigerating unit was not adequate to cope with such a large amount of body heat all of a sudden. So we mounted a series of fans in positions to blow air in over cakes of ice. Finally, about midnight, the noise ceased; hibernation had been accomplished. A night watch of soldiers took over, and we turned in.
The next day the bats were still nicely quiet and we started a trial with the lightest of the dummy bombs. A first batch of bats in hibernation with weights attached was dumped out of the bomber at a low altitude, 2,000 ft. as I recall. The ground crew scurried around in jeeps and eventually located a group of free-fallers large enough to show that few if any of the bats had come out of hibernation. Other batches were released from higher and higher altitudes, which made reconnaissance increasingly difficult. Eventually it was clear that the bats were not in hibernation but dead. Our cooling had been too efficient, too sudden.
Imagine, then, a surprise attack on Tokyo in which a succession of bombers would operate at high altitude for about half an hour, say starting at midnight, each delivering a load of bat-bombs equivalent to some 3,700 fires. There would be no explosions or fire bursts to give warning, and the bombers would depart. With the activated mechanisms all set for a fourhour delay, bombs in strategic and not easily detectable locations would start popping all over the city at 4 a.m. An attractive picture? AU those working on the project thought so. Then, suddenly, X-ray was cancelled. I never learned the reason, but can make a guess. The bats would be vectors for bombs, but they would be vectors also for germs. Our side might be accused of initiating biological warfare. But the job was done very effectively by M-69s.
People get speeding tickets going [...] nowhere
How did you manage that one?
Never mind, dumb question. I got a ticket once for failing to use my turn signal--while going straight.
Don't give them any ideas. It's been a good while since we got bennettrolled.
+1, Bravo.
I wouldn't be surprised if we see a slew of products in the future where you're only licensed to use them until the warranty expires, first sale doctrine be damned. That, and the inclusion of DRM to disable them as soon as the warranty^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsubscription expires.
Clearly, I'm out of touch with modern technology. Thanks for pointing that out.
For the rest of you, get your glass pressure cookers off my lawn!
Memory leaky. Soon to have targeted advertising. Uses at least 2x the memory available.
What? I've never owned one with a clear lid. They've always been solid metal. You don't typically make pressure vessels out of glass. You're thinking of a crock pot/slow cooker.
It's woefully inadequate for charging at acceptable rates. A good friend of mine drives an EV (a VW Golf) and the thing takes several hours to charge with a physical cable. The fastest level charging standard isn't even available nearby, and we have a pretty decent amount of charging stations here in MA.
My excuse for what?
Basically, Slashdot's getting into the click-bait business now.
Slashdot has been in the clickbait business for a long while now.
At least EA is sure to be eating their own dog food then. ;)
Getting into? You must be... *looks at UID*
What *is* your excuse, anyway?
Good. I'm glad someone has the balls to stand up and point out double standards--even if you don't agree with someone's views. Especially when you don't agree with someone's views.
Make a hollow propeller mounted on a pen tube, with a hole at each end of the prop (facing opposite directions, to drive the prop). Push pen tube through 2 liter bottle cap (loosely fitting in the hole), cut tube short, flare end to retain. Fill bottle with mentos and coke as usual and cap.
Might work, might not. Haven't tried it, but you could work out the bugs (bubbles?) pretty cheap.
Dump unoxidized carbon out the sides. Also, at hypersonic velocities, you're heating and dissociating the air by definition,which reduces the efficiency of the laser.
From your link:
Saturation attacks. Since a laser can attack only one target at a time, requires several seconds to disable it, and several more seconds to be redirected to the next target, a laser can disable only so many targets within a given period of time. This places an upper limit on the ability of an individual laser to deal with saturation attacks—attacks by multiple weapons that approach the ship simultaneously or within a few seconds of one another. This limitation can be mitigated by installing more than one laser on the ship, similar to how the Navy installs multiple CIWS systems on certain ships.
Hardened targets and countermeasures. Less-powerful lasers—that is, lasers with beam powers measured in kilowatts (kW) rather than megawatts (MW) 10 — can have less effectiveness against targets that incorporate shielding, ablative material, or highly reflective surfaces, or that rotate rapidly (so that the laser spot does not remain continuously on a single location on the target’s surface) or tumble.
Now, another reference:
In order to facilitate comparison with the findings of other authors we chose to express the threshold fluence in units of pulse energy per unit area . The multipulse damage threshold for molybdenum at 1064 nm reported by Zhou [29] of 1 J/cm^2 for 10 ns pulses is rather higher than the value of the order of 0.3 J/cm^2 we find. Similarly, we find that stainless steel gets damaged at about 0.2 J/cm^2, whereas the value of 2.3 J/cm^2 for 120 ns pulses at 1064 nm found by Leontyev [30] would lead us to expect a threshold of around 0.4 J/cm^2 for 5 ns pulses.
Also, you're severely overestimating the reflectivity of materials likely to be exposed to the atmosphere, especially in battle conditions. 70% would be nice. They also discuss that, as well as how much short pulses at short wavelengths reduce the reflectivity (up to around ~25% in nitrogen, which air is largely composed of).
Your mirror would cease to be a mirror in very short order by either sheer ablation or the formation of oxides, reducing its ability to reflect, causing the absorption of more energy, at which point your mirror ablates. HTH.
It only says bear arms. It doesn't specify which kind of bear arms. Grizzly, polar, you name it; its arms are up for grabs!
...could be worse still: Slashdot could be teaching Constitutional Law, which means you'd start with a car analogy.
Unfortunately, someone ripped out all the wire for the copper, jacked the stereo, and left the car up on blocks with no wheels.
Click Score to see the reason. You'll need to be logged in.
Shifting the burden onto the taxpayers only pushes the majority of them further into the hole as the potholes continue to go unfixed and their beater car gets the shit beat out of it. After all, there's not much budget left for the massive amount of roadwork...
You're welcome for the car.
You grossly misunderstand. You wouldn't surround it with something, but stick a rocket on it (possibly two, like a spinning wheel firework) and accelerate it in the direction it's already spinning. No washing machine required, and the technology is almost simple as possible: anchor + rocket.
As for iron, you'd need to exceed the tensile strength+gravity of the material to begin with, which is already going to require an object spinning enormously fast. I DID say it was probably not feasible. It was just an amusing thought. Perhaps you should learn to read and separate serious suggestions from facetious ones.
Also, a nuke is highly unlikely to simply "evaporate" a large body. You might succeed in creating a cloud of large debris though, as plenty of objects are loosely held together to begin with.
Not quite what you suggested, but I had the amusing idea of spinning the thing up until it can't hold itself together. Probably not feasible and probably not a great idea if you don't manage to break it into small enough chunks...
The object is likely spinning. I'd want to eliminate the tether, which is huge point of failure. While static loading isn't as big an issue, shock loading IS a big problem, and it's unlikely we'll be able to entirely prevent it, or it will be prohibitively expensive in terms of mass (fuel for burns to slowly load the tether). Either way, you'll need to match the spin (i.e., orbit around) the object in order to eliminate the relative motion.
Also, I have no idea how much force you would need to perturb the orbit sufficiently. If you were still spinning, you would only be able to fire the engines for a portion of your orbit. You might actually use that to stop the spin, and then drag it higher/lower in its orbit. In any event, you would need the required force to be less than the maximum static load on your tether multiplied by the fraction of the time you can actually burn the engines.
IANAAE (I am not an aerospace engineer). You probably shouldn't actually try anything I suggest.
I am not the AC, and I don't know anything about raptor mortality WRT wind turbines, but a simple google got me this as the first link. (Search: altamont wind new vs old turbines)
Raptor Mortality at Altamont Pass (CA) - Reported raptor mortality at Altamont Pass (CA), has ranged from 0.05 to 0.10 fatalities per turbine per year (Erickson et al . 2001). Pre- construction raptor use is generally lower at other wind projects compared to the Altamont area. Approximately 50% of the turbines currently in operation at Altamont Pass (CA) (approximately 3,000 out of 5,400) are Kenetech 56-100 turbines equipped on 18 m lattice towers, with rotor diameters of 18 m, down-wind blades spinning at approximately 60 revolutions per minute (rpm), with tips within 9 meters of the ground. These turbines are located in a high density and clustered arrangement within the 60 mi 2 WRA. Recent studies suggest the 56-100 turbines may cause higher golden eagle mortality than other turbine types (Hunt 2002). The cause of the higher raptor mortality at Altamont is likely a combination of several factors including those listed above (turbine types and confi gurations), as well as raptor use of the area.
Data Used in This Analysis Erickson et al. (2001) recently summarized the operational fatality monitoring data available through the middle of 2001. This report contains a meta-analysis 1 that extends the Erickson et al. (2001) mortality summary to include both baseline data on avian and bat use 2, raptor nesting 3 , and operational avian and bat fatality monitoring data, including recently collected data at the Foote Creek Rim (WY), Stateline (OR/WA), Klondike (OR), and Buffalo Mountain (TN) wind plants. Over 30 study areas from 15 Wind Resource Areas (WRA) were used in at least one of the following components of this synthesis: avian mortality, avian use, raptor nesting, bat mortality and bat use.