Two Amazing Weapon Systems America is Researching

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Two Amazing Weapon Systems America is Researching

Written By : Duane Lester

The United States has always had the best weapons systems in the world. The billions of dollars spent in the Department of Defense have insured America’s dominance in this field.

Currently, two systems are being tested that I find simply amazing. The first one is lasers.

The Air Force recently test-fired its Advanced Tactical Laser from a C-130 Hercules, scorching a truck’s hood. And last month the Army and Air Force teamed with Boeing Co. for a demonstration in which lasers on the ground shot down drones at China Lake, Calif., company officials said.

Laser weapon projects in the works include the Navy’s powerful Free Electron Laser; the Advanced Tactical Laser; the Laser Avenger, which was used to shoot down the drones at China Lake; and the Army’s High Energy Laser Technology Demonstrator, or HEL TD.

“The technology is there,” said Scott McPheeters, senior research engineer at the Army’s Program Executive Office Missiles and Space in Huntsville, Ala. “What we need to do is get the systems put into more rugged configurations [to handle different environments].”

The lasers are working, both in the air and on the ground. Incredible.

Once these are deployed to the battlefield, I wonder how long until they are found on drones. If you can fit it on a Hummer, you should be able to attach it to a drone. I’m sure there would be different hardware and software requirements, but it’s definitely possible.

The second system that impressed the heck out of me is the Navy’s railgun. We are talking about a ship mounted weapon that shoots projectiles are around Mach 5. Yeah, it’s that cool:

The Navy is researching rail guns because they would weigh less than conventional ones, and since they rely on electromagnetics to fire rounds, you wouldn’t need a big, dangerous pile of explosives stored in a magazine. All of that means a lighter ship, and a much more deadly ship: a combat-ready rail gun would be able to fire Mach 5 projectiles over 200 miles with pinpoint accuracy, hitting 5 meter targets.

The Navy tested one of these guns in February. As the link above noted, it destroyed everything it touched. Check out this amazing video:

Very impressive. The projectile is traveling at 8,270 feet a second, or 5,640 mph. And the weapon was fired at one third its power.

Now if we can just keep the liberals from gutting the R&D funding, these weapons will make America even stronger.

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http://networdblog.blogspot.com/ Christopher_Taylor

So far the rail gun is impractical for two reasons:

1) it requires gargantuan power to fire, really only feasible on very large ships and for a few shots on a train.
2) so far each time they fire one, it melts the array so badly it cannot be fired again. This may have been solved at least partially with the last few tests.
arthur_branch

So far the rail gun is impractical for two reasons:
1) it requires gargantuan power to fire, really only feasible on very large ships and for a few shots on a train.
2) so far each time they fire one, it melts the array so badly it cannot be fired again. This may have been solved at least partially with the last few tests.
Posted by Christopher_Taylor
2009-12-28 23:33:15

Might be impractical… for now. Back in the early 80′s hitting a missile with a missile was impossible. Now we can do just that.
Pingback: Two Amazing Weapon Systems America is Researching | Right Wing News | americantoday
Toastrider

Yeah, if they’ve fixed the whole problem of the rail system damaging or destroying itself, then things are going to get /really/ interesting.
DCS

Not sure about the second problem, but the first problem can be easily fixed. Just mount the sucker on a ship with a reactor instead of a standard oil fired plant.

I’m getting giddy just thinking about lasers and gauss rifles. Now, let’s make them man portable and get some true battle armor and let’s see what we can do.
http://www.superdickery.com mightysamurai

Might be impractical… for now. Back in the early 80′s hitting a missile with a missile was impossible. Now we can do just that.

Different situation. Making a better guidance system is a lot easier than generating more power because there’s only so much energy you can generate on a given scale. To generate more you may need to move up to a larger scale, which may end up defeating the purpose of the railgun.

Certainly it warrants further research, but until some big advancement comes along color me skeptical.
tblrk2006

Lets hope we dont put all our eggs in the defense basket. New offensive weapons are just as important.
Mike_M

I like the progress on the laser. It has more far-reaching implications, especially for defensive purposes. Forget hitting a missile with a missile, attach a laser to a guidance system and you’re using light itself. (Of course that can still be screwed up, as Spies Like Us taught us.)

Actually, considering the laser could detonate missiles or explosive shells with relative ease once guidance is worked out, the only weapon that could get through to a ship or ground target protected by one would be…the railgun. Not too big a surprise that both are being developed at the same time by the military.
http://arcadehomer.blogspot.com celebrim

For me, the question is, “Are we progressing technologically, or are we regressing and heading toward a new ‘dark age’?”

To really understand this question, its essential to understand what happened in the last ‘dark age’ and exactly when it began. It’s also helpful to understand where we are now.

On the question of where we are now, the second decade of the 21st century finds America as a well developed Tech Level 7 (TL7) culture with a blossoming infromation infrastructure, advances in AI, and a minor but promising space program. We would like to see America, or at least somewhere in the world, make the transition from a TL7 culture over to a TL8 culture sometime in the near future. A TL8 culture is one we might describe as ‘near sci-fi’, and would have various inventions which where featured in a sci-fi novel of a few decades back that was supposedly set in the near future. There is some reason to expect that we are headed that way as a global culture, but there is also some reason to expect that we are wavering and even in some areas regressing.

To answer the first question, when we think of ‘Dark Ages’, we typically think of the medieval period, of say 500 AD to 1400 AD. However, this perception is largely based on anti-Catholic propaganda from the Reinnasance and Reformation eras. An actual investigation of the sources and inventions of the middle ages era paints a very different picture. The medievals were actually tech nerds, and in many areas where advancing technology beyond that of the ancient world through almost the whole of the dark ages. There was little or nothing dark about the period from 900 AD to 1400 AD, and in fact the first industrial revolution since the invention of agriculture allowed specialized craftsman to develop was taking place. Even in the period from 500 AD to 900 AD, when western Europe went truly dark, technology was steadily advancing behind the the curtain. The ancient world economy was slave based. The medieval economy was based on mechanization driven by simple machines like pulleys and gears, and wind and water power.

Likewise, the traditional picture of the medieval era was one of regression in the sciences. The orthodox historical account was essentially that someone, either the Christians or the Moslems, ‘burned the books’ and as a result the Greek sciences were almost lost. However, a close examination of this reveals a more important culprit – the Romans themselves. The problem in the West was that they’d inherited Latin as the lingua franca of intellectual discussion, and the Romans, being utterly uninterested in things without immediate practical value were so uninterested in basic research that they’d never bothered to translate any of the Greek texts into Latin. Relying on a Latin compendium of knowledge, the Christian West simple didn’t even know the Greek texts existed until the Crusades brought the Christian West into direct contact with the former Greek speaking part of the Roman Empire. Once the Greek texts were recovered though, there was an immediate surge of interest in the West into empirical research.

A fair reading of the history is that the Dark Ages began to set into the West as early as 200 BC, with the collapse of the great centers of greek education in the Hellenistic empire. The Greeks had invented calculus, primitive steam engines, and differential gearing by 200 BC, but lost interest in them and the Romans never picked them up. The technology of calculus and differential gearing systems became lost long before anyone was on hand to burn the books. Nearly 2000 years of technological progress in the fields of mathimatics and engineering was lost as a result of Greek Decadence and Roman indifference. Much as with China’s invention of the mechanical clock in the 10th century, the West simply forgot it had ever invented it. When Western traders reintroduced the mechanical clock to China in the 17th century, Chinese scholar’s never even recognized it as the reintroduction of lost lore but considered it a Western inovation – even though the technology possibly came in part from China. This actually gives us some clue to when a dark age in the East occurred, even if no history book so labels it. The ‘Western Miracle’ was heightened by a slow down and even regression in the East, largely heightened by the East’s inability to transform from a then highly successful centralized public sector driven economy to the decentralized private sector driven economy that came to dominate the West.

I believe we are balanced on a cultural knife’s edge right now. We might advance toward TL8, or we might enter in a new dark age where, like the medievals, we regress on several key fronts. Like the medievals, it’s likely that even in the event of a dark age, we’ll continue to advance automation technology (in fact, like the medievals, a dark age might give a special impetus to automation research). But we have already largely abandoned our space program, and a severe energy crisis seems likely in our near future. The journey to the moon was two generations ago and the technology and infrastructure necessary to go back is all but lost. Powerful social forces are demanding wide reduction in industrial output and human productivity. I see progress on ‘near sci-fi’ projects like lasers and rail-guns as critical markers in our progress. If we step back from these advances, it’s not clear when we’ll be going forward again on those fronts.
http://guardian.blogdrive.com/ CavalierX

How about the XM25, from H&K and Alliant Techsystems? They were working on the OICW, but apparently that got scrapped and only one of its components, the grenade/mini-rocket launcher with programmable ammo, has come any further.
tblrk2006

[...] the original post here: Two Amazing Weapon Systems America is Researching | Right Wing News Share and [...]
Posted by Two Amazing Weapon Systems America is Researching | Right Wing News | americantoday
2009-12-29 02:22:20

This crap is getting old. Please scrub these posts.
Mike_M

“I believe we are balanced on a cultural knife’s edge right now.”

I think humanity has been more on that knife’s edge than we’re comfortable admitting for most of our history.

It seems every time an archaeological discovery is made, human civilization is determined to be older and more advanced than previously thought. We like to think of our knowledge as linear and inherited, but it’s easy to find periods of lost knowledge and regression. There are certainly more.

I find these questions fascinating whenever I come across them in reading. Things like, when and how were the Great Pyramids really built and how can the mathematical knowledge contained in them be explained? Moreso for the great stone constructions of Central and South America? Why does nearly every culture on earth have a similar flood “myth” that happened around the same time? Why are there maps dated in the 1400′s that are uncannily accurate for places supposedly not yet discovered? What was lost in the Library of Alexandria when it burned? Ditto for what was lost after the fall of the Greek and Roman empires, and what was destroyed by the Spanish in the conquest of the New World.

There could even well be lost Ages of humanity in Tolkienesque terms. I’ve read interpretations of Mayan legend that claims this is actually the Fifth Age of humanity, and some of our more recent god legends are actually accounts of survivors of the previous fallen civilization attempting to recivilize scattered tribes. For example, Quetzalcoatl is said to have given writing, the calendar, and maize agriculture to Mesoamerica. Well…what if he actually did, but instead of a god was just a visitor from an advanced civilization that we have yet to discover? Say 75% of the world population is wiped out from a meteor strike and 200 years from now most people live a Victorian lifestyle. If a pocket of the United States survived and one day a Bill Gates of the future flies up in a helicopter and starts passing out laptops, chances are he’s going to be deified at some level. Or at least a lot is going to get written about him.

Anyways, the possibilities are fascinating, and I think there is more missing from our history than we like to believe.
Rickvid_in_Seattle

Oh, you people. Just think of how many poor people The One could buy off, I mena, help if only you eeevvviiilll conservatives were not so determined to take the world to war for profit and Bu$hitler!
http://arcadehomer.blogspot.com celebrim

“Things like, when and how were the Great Pyramids really built and how can the mathematical knowledge contained in them be explained?”

There are several dangers you need to avoid or at least account for when reconstructing history along these lines.

1) Romaniticizing the Past: There is a repeated tendency throughout history to look back to a ‘Golden Age’ where everything was better than it is now. A careful reading of what I wrote should make it clear that I’m not advancing this notion. The dark ages were not as dark as the Rennaisance writers would have you believe, nor was antiquity as advanced as they would like to believe. One of the problems of the late Hellenistic culture was there tendency to look back on the ‘Classical’ period as a time when everything was better, the scholars were smarter, and all the real advances in knowledge had taken place. They fell into memorizing the learning of the past rather than advancing it. When you attempt to reconstruct history, you have to avoid simple narratives about a ‘Golden Age’. Aristotle, for example, was an idiot, but the Greeks became so infatuated with teaching Aristotle (and textually passed this to the Medievals) that they were ignoring their own observations of his fallacy by other scholars. When I speak of a ‘dark age’, I mean a period in which some learning on some fronts is lost, not a general period where all learning regresses or comes to a halt.

One of the problems with reading historical sources is that they usually have an axe to grind, and one of the most common axes to grind is ‘we need to get back to the good old days’. This can either be in the form of, “These kids these days…”, or “Our parents are idiots…”.

2) The Noble Savage: Another sort of historical bias that has cropped up since the dawn of history is, “Our civilization has become unvirtuous. This simple culture over the hill actually have it right!” A variation on that is, “Our civilization has become unvirtuous. This simple culture had it right before it was corrupted by contact with our own evil culture.” Believe it or not, you actually find that sort of thing all the way back to Rome and Classical Greece. Some authors of highly advanced cultures almost invariably attribute honesty, modesty, integrity, courage, thrift, spirituality, or environmental sensitivity to some neighboring primitives. In fact, this is almost never actually born out by actual knowledge of said culture, it’s just a convienent goad against whatever the writer wants to moralize about. The variation where the primitives were actually virtuous in the past has the virtue of not being easily disproved by contact with the present version of said culture. You just blame all the bad things on ‘contact’ and the corrupting forces of your own culture. Again, this is 1000′s of years old, and its hogwash.

One particularly pernicious version of this is inventing a noble cultural tradition for yourself. For example, almost everything non-scholars think they know about Druidism was invented whole-cloth in the 15th-17th century centuries after Druidism was extent for more than 1000 years by Northern European propagandists who wanted to invent a virtous, noble, learned culture to parallel the Greek and Roman traditions of Southern Europe. In other words, while the Italian propagandist was lionizing the achievements of Greece and Rome, the Northern European propogandist felt left out. A proud cultural tradition needed to be invented to give the northern European tribe something to brag about. So Druidism was invented as we know it, with the long bearded, robed, astronomer priest and wizard as its hero. In fact, there is no particular reason to think that the real druids were particularly advanced in math or astronomy. Stonehenge for example had been abandoned for at least 1000 years when Druidism actually flourished, and had nothing to do with the Celts.

3) Crypto-Science: Another basic problem is that ‘awesome’ sells. It’s much more exciting to imagine lost civilizations like Atlantis and so forth than it is to imagine that they don’t exist. So, many writers take the scant evidence and the general theory of ‘all myths must have some basis in fact’ and run with it to create the most outlandish possible explanations. The problem is that as a general rule, myth itself tends to be crypto-science stories that overstate the ‘awesome’. As a general rule, you’d expect the truth to be less outlandish than the myth. If you take the opposite tack, that the truth is more outlandish than the myth and build on scant circumstantial evidence to support the forgone conclusion of ‘awesome’, and then latter take some cryto-science writer’s statements as fact and build on them, pretty soon you have something truly ‘awesome’ indeed. But, you haven’t done anything but create a myth with footnotes.

The Pyramids aren’t particularly mysterious. The Egyptians did have advanced math and astronomy for the time, but there is no sign of lost knowledge or inexplicably advanced knowledge. Virtually everything about the math involved can be explained by the fact that they used a wheel to make their measurements. Rolling off a wheel marked in one spot 100 times will create a base distance that is a natural multiple of pi even if you don’t know what pi is. Likewise, nothing about Egyptian construction methods is inexplicable if you have sufficient labor and cost is not a major consideration. Most arguments about how the Pyramids were made focus on what was the cheapest way that they could have been made with the technology at hand. No one outside of cryto-science seriously argues that they needed any sort of ‘advanced’ technology to do it.
http://networdblog.blogspot.com/ Christopher_Taylor

The technology and math involved to build the pyramids is not actually that advanced – the bigger you work, the more tolerance there is for error and the easier it is to work out the math.

I agree we easily could slouch into a dark age of regression in technology. There’s been zero new tech for more than fifty years – before you shout “what about?” remember, using old tech in new ways is not new. The biggest advances we’ve seen so far have all been in entertainment and leisure, with a few in military. That’s just not enough to drive our future, we have to have real interest in other areas, not just what makes us safe and happy.

The culture drives advancement, not the other way around. Our postmodern culture now is so focused on comfort, happiness, health, and safety that there’s no drive to do things risky or not profitable for the sheer sake of adventure, discovery, and achievement.
President_Friedman

As long as we don’t lose central heat and air, I’ll be OK.
President_Friedman

I think the unprecedented amount of worldwide information dissemination we have in modern society will keep us from ever again sliding into a ‘dark age’ where major technological innovations are completely lost for hundreds of years. But in America we seem to be entering (or perhaps even have already crested) the peak of our dominance in technological innovation, which (more than anything else) has allowed us to be more productive than any other workforce in the world. So we might entering an economic ‘dark age’ of sorts here in America, but I think if you zoom out and look at the whole world, there are a lot of civilizations who are just starting to reap the technological benefits that we already take for granted, meaning that things worldwide may be getting better (but we may experience a “negative” in that equation nonetheless). And let’s not forget that innovative use of existing technology is just as important as creating new technology… the guy who invented the gear was really just using the wheel in a new way. So in that regards, we have the technological substrate in place to do a lot with a little.

Space, genetics, and nano-technology seem to be the areas where we are primed to make true ‘game changing’ advances, but first we have to identify and sell people on the practical applications of those advantages. Part of the reason whey we haven’t been back to the moon, for instance, is that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of compelling reasons to dish out the money to go there.

At any rate, I can’t think of a better time or place to have been alive than here and now, even with all the problems we have. When I read about how we are on the verge of a long downhill cultural slide, I am often reminded of this old poem:

My grandad, viewing the earth’s worn cogs;
Said things were going to the dogs;
His grandad in his house of logs;
Said things were going to the dogs;
His grandad in the Flemish bogs;
Said things were going to the dogs;
His grandad in his old skin togs;
Said things were going to the dogs;
There’s one thing that I have to state-
Those dogs have had a good long wait.
http://arcadehomer.blogspot.com celebrim

“I think the unprecedented amount of worldwide information dissemination we have in modern society will keep us from ever again sliding into a ‘dark age’ where major technological innovations are completely lost for hundreds of years.”

Quite the contrary, the unprecedented amount of worldwide information dissemination is exactly why it would be so easy to slip into another dark age now. The vast majority of that information is not in a particularly stable form. If the civilization collapsed for just a few years, the vast majority of the world’s information would simply either disappear or become unrecoverable. Think of all the different information formats we have that aren’t human readable and aren’t transmittable without the vast complicated information infrastructure we have. If the information infrastructure begins to collapse, it could easily create a cascading failure where the loss of each peice renders the next peice unrecoverable. More to the point, this collapse could occur on a wide scale locally, with vast areas losing the ability to read CD’s or DVD’s (for example). How easily could you recover data from a 5 1/4″ floppy disk at this time? Could you build a new CD reader? Could you decode a particular file format from scratch?

Our current society depends on the ability to repeatedly continiously update and record information into new formats. One break in the chain and enormous ammounts of information could simply disappear. All that needs to happen is a shock to the system such that information is decaying faster than it can be produced. And the most critical bits of information would be the ones that are most vulnerable. We might keep the Twilight books for centuries until the last bits of bleached paper died to acid decay, but most of our critical scientific information exists in far fewer copies than the latest music hits or books of the month. It need not happen all at once, nor might we not even notice when it begins to happen.

Our libraries are just as vulnerable and maybe even more vulnerable than the racks of papyrus scrolls that the libraries of the ancient world depended on. Papyrus lasts for centuries even millenia in the right conditions undecayed and readable. Those CD’s and acid washed modern paper die in under 100 years, and that’s assuming you still have a CD player. Magnetic tape media die even faster.
http://conservativebootcamp.com martinhale

In my estimation, that ‘knife’s edge’ is always just millimetres away. No matter how bright and clever we humans are, we’re just not smart enough to perfectly anticipate and defend against all possible forms of attack/damage.

Think about it: the modern world would be savaged by a man-caused/natural/alien global EMP event. All of the systems used to bring water and electricity to our homes and take waste away from them would simply stop working. Most people’s livlihoods would be gone. Food would stop arriving at the local supermarket. State of the art communications would consist of a pad of paper and a writing instrument. It could be months or even years before enough repairs are made to get society moving forward again, but that might not prevent a rapid regression to a relatively primitive lifestyle.

As Celebrim says, a large chunk of our archived data is very vulnerable because it’s held in forms which are not truly permanent. It’s a pernicious problem, and one not easily solved. Electronic storage of data is clearly the preferred medium, because of it’s capacity and because of it’s ease of use. But it’s also just as vulnerable as were the scrolls in the library at Alexandria.
President_Friedman

Posted by celebrim
2009-12-29 16:54:27

I think the type of ‘civilization collapse’ necessary to wipe out all our global information systems, data storage (hard copy and electronic), and libraries is incredibly unlikely. Our tiny public library serving a town of 2500 people probably has more books in it than were published worldwide in any 25 year period prior to Guttenburg’s printing press (which, perhaps non-coincidentally, was invented in 1440, at the tail end of the Dark Ages).

Could it happen? Certainly, under the right catastrophic conditions. But I don’t buy into the ‘balanced on the razor’s edge’ scenario.
http://guardian.blogdrive.com/ CavalierX

Celebrim’s right. Civilisation is not as stable as most of you would like to think. It’s actually the exception in human history, not the rule. The great civilisations we read about only extended as far as their armies could keep the barbarians at bay. Sooner or later, the barbarians always break through. In our case, the walls holding barbarism at bay are formed of electronic bits of data. It’s not the destruction of information per se that would take place in the wake of, say, massive EMP strikes. It’s the rioting and looting that would inevitably follow when electricity, food delivery and emergency services are cut off for days or weeks that would damage our civilisation to the root.
http://networdblog.blogspot.com/ Christopher_Taylor

I think the unprecedented amount of worldwide information dissemination we have in modern society will keep us from ever again sliding into a ‘dark age’ where major technological innovations are completely lost for hundreds of years.

I think these advances can be effectively lost through sloth, ignorance, and a lack of motivation and ambition. Think Idiocracy, not Medieval Times.
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