"60 times the amount of energy put in"

by **BILL_THA_PHARMACIZT** » Wed 01 Dec 2004, 02:06:09

here is an article that has alot of big words I don't understand... mabe sombody with a brain can walk me through it in baby steps...and critique it as well

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994049

by **TrueKaiser** » Wed 01 Dec 2004, 02:57:55

not a energy source but a damn scary weapon..

by **bentstrider** » Wed 01 Dec 2004, 07:58:40

perhaps the next US Civil War will be fought with these.
The die-hard, petro-hungry camp, vs. the people who want to move forward at any cost to economic gains.
I would rather have any die-off, due to this weapon.
As opposed to a more painful, starve-off.

by **khebab** » Wed 01 Dec 2004, 08:51:15

Gamma rays are the most powerful particles that you can find, the most poweful events in the universe are gamma-ray bursts oocuring when two black holes collide into each others. American creativity in weaponery keeps amazing me!! too bad they don't invest all this knowledge into developping new renewable energy sources.

by **lowem** » Wed 01 Dec 2004, 09:29:14

Hey, that's moving right into sci-fi territory already. Ray guns, imagine.

What's next : anti-matter cannon, positron blasters. Half-Life 2's gravity gun! Robotech reflex weaponry!

by **Madpaddy** » Wed 01 Dec 2004, 09:33:01

Hi Bill,

I think we should stick to the magic cookies and lucky charms don't you. Imagine an accident at a gamma radiation power plant.

CRINGE.

by **Kingcoal** » Wed 01 Dec 2004, 09:40:41

A nuclear bomb without most of the blast. Sounds kind of like a neutron bomb.

by **Aaron** » Wed 01 Dec 2004, 10:30:52

And the fact that it's public knowledge implies it's possible that this technology has already been weaponed.

Imagine what else is concealed from us based on national security.

The DOD executed MANY black operations using the Shuttle during the 80's to launch "secret" payloads.

We are left to speculate on just what they have been up to, but it sure was expensive whatever it was given the gigantic black budget items in government spending.

A friend who's father was a senior NASA guy told his son before he died that there were things he had sworn an oath to never to disclose, but that we would all be amazed.

It's what we don't know we don't know that's the key.

by **big_rc** » Wed 01 Dec 2004, 12:24:51

WOW. That article was really amazing. At least it is good to know that we are getting a good return on our half a trillion dollar defense budget. Too bad we couldn't use that time, money and energy on some truly useful applications instead of world domination. Supposedly the defense industry loves these skirmishes that the US is constantly getting into because it gives them a chance to test out new equipment and weapons. Fallujah residents have reportedly been on the wrong end of our new phosphorus weapons that are supposedly pretty damn nasty.

I am currently employed on some defense related projects and some of the stuff I have seen truly amazes me. I was having dinner with some guys from a huge defense related company in the US and they were all giddy talking about this new type of projectile that their company developed. It appears that this projectile can penetrate soft tissue but explode when it contacts hard tissue like bone. The scary thing is that these guys figured out a way to adjust the explosive nature of the projectile to correlate with steel, wood, etc.

by **Guest** » Wed 01 Dec 2004, 21:03:13

"The effect of a nuclear-isomer explosion would be to release high-energy gamma rays capable of killing any living thing in the immediate area. It would cause little fallout compared to a fission explosion, but any undetonated isomer would be dispersed as small radioactive particles, making it a somewhat "dirty" bomb. This material could cause long-term health problems for anybody who breathed it in."

It's a basically a scalable mini-nuke.

The cost is very high and it'll take 5+ years for the technology to be invented to make it effective. Reading between the lines, it sounds like this device would require some type of complex 'charging' system.

It sounds like quite the pork project for some defense contractor.

by **pilferage** » Wed 01 Dec 2004, 22:56:46

I'm thinking gamma-ray lasers... maybe star wars did pay off?
Check out this atmospheric opacity wrt various photonic wavelengths....
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~efortin/the ... _all.shtml
gamma-rays would be the best in terms of lasers getting through the atmosphere. Also, since ozone absorbs most of the gamma-ray radiation from space, wouldn't the best place to stick one of those satellites be around the ozone hole in antarctica, so they could angle a shot in through the hole...
they might even be able to target most of the nothern hemisphere through the hole...

I've officially 'lost it'! :-D

by **lowem** » Fri 03 Dec 2004, 00:12:11

I guess we shouldn't be too surprised if there are already a few working ion cannons in orbit, eh?

by **TrueKaiser** » Fri 03 Dec 2004, 00:46:26

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lowem', 'I') guess we shouldn't be too surprised if there are already a few working ion cannons in orbit, eh?

"60 times the amount of energy put in"

"60 times the amount of energy put in"

Who is online