Death Weapons of the Future...

<A HREF="http://www.perpetual.net/kyle/index.asp?Section=engineering" target="_new">Clickable!</A>

Spud gun.lol.



<font color=blue>Is there a forum </font color=blue><font color=purple>for forum addiction?</font color=purple>

I also thought it was interesting that rcf84 related railguns to Q3A, and not to anything anime, BattleTech, or even to Q2 for that matter.

-Intelicide: The act of marketing overriding engineers to kill a product before it can be released.

Railguns have been around forever. They just don't shoot different color streams depending on your preference

If I remember correctly they were trying to make a railgun that could be put on Navy ships but it was too big. They were also hoping to put a railgun into space but it would have been too big and expensive.

<font color=red>Yeah, I took a crap on your lawn. Whatcha gonna do about it?</font color=red>

Rail Guns,Microwave Guns, LASERs and any other Focused Energy Weapons have been around since the late '70. We have the technology to build, let's say a portable Microwave gun small enough to fit on a tank chassy but we lack the power source. Only portable nuclear reactors can ensure enough "food" for such weapons to make them usefull in a war.
Indeed, a spaces based energy weapon, powered by nuclear reactors could be built. We have the technology to build a replica of the C&C Ion Cannon but it's costs as production, delivery & maintanance would be enormous. Plasma is good because it travels at extremly high speed, can be obtained by cycling in a particle accelerator some ions (Hydrogen can be obtained directly from space - check out the Bussard spaceship engine) If you send a volume of 500 cubic meters of superheated fluid (15000+ degrees(C)) down to Earth from high orbit (not low orbit because youre platform will be vulnerable to ballistic missiles - maybe you could equip the platform with engines and it could shift it's orbit...) into an airfield, for example, you will incinerate everything. Even if you have a 50% energy loss due to atmospheric interaction you'll still destroy any kind of aircraft or installation.
But, then again, nukes are cheaper and more feared...
END.

General Failure reading HDD C:
Who the f*** is General Failure and why is he reading my HDD?

Didja' happen to see the article in TIME about a year ago, concerning weapons which emit frequencies to shut down your brain? Literally. It's just a 'ray gun' that takes a sample of the intended targets brain activity (alpha, beta, gamma waves), and I guess through destructive interference, renders you unconscious/dead.

Next best thing to a neutron bomb?

please god say that comment wasnt serious...

eh, i'll procrastinate later...

Just joking.

Those Damm Northwood p4's better be cheaper.

Nice Intel and AMD users get a Cookie.... Yummy

I thought that development of MASERs was outlawed because it was an invisible beam weapon and it could easily do damage that would create long-term problems without immediate concerns.

Which is also the same reason why the development of x-ray cannons has gone nowhere.

So it wasn't the technology holding back the development, but just the ethics of using it as a weapon.

-Intelicide: The act of marketing overriding engineers to kill a product before it can be released.

Since when have rail guns been a focused energy weapon, they use an electro magnetic pulse to accellerate a projectile to extremely high velocities. Even a small projectile at high velocity can do a lot of damage especially if the projectile is 'soft'.

Note there is a different weapon type called an EM gun which only gives out an EM pulse (often refered to as HEMP) this pulse will be able to wipe out silicon based control systems so could, for example, down a plane by taking out it's computers. The pulse is not visible and therefore you certainly cannot change it's colour.

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Look at the size of that thing!

Well learned alot now. I be MASER by thug in the future instead of being shot.

Nice Intel and AMD users get a Cookie.... Yummy

A rail gun does not use charged particles as a projectile they use light weight compound projectiles, compounds used are designed to both deform on impact and carry a charge which is produced by the transit of the Sabot and not the 'gun'. The launch process is basically an exercise in control of capacitance and inductance in the launcher, careful control of the shape of the supplied pulse can create massive differences in exit velocity. This is not an energy weapon, where the only output of the device is energy in some form (i.e an atomic manipulation such as a Laser)

HEMP weapons (High Energy Magnetic Pulse) weapons are out and about today. (Non nuclear devices)

Try reading Winn Schwanntau's book, 'Information Warfare'. After working for the government for 15 years I know what I'm talking about.

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Look at the size of that thing!

Erm maybe I'm being dumb on this one, a Laser is basically light , what Kinetic energy does it have? Kinetic energy being a mass/velocity thing.

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Look at the size of that thing!

I wondered the exact same thing when I first heard the idea. You'd have to crack out a physics book and a calculator to do the math. Light, more or less, has 'mass'.

It takes a heck of a lot longer to convert the photon energy of any wavelength into thermal energy emitted by the object. Even infared light takes time to 'warm' an object, so that it emits infared light. It's just energy, but different =) There's just not enought time for the power to be absorbed by the electrons. And there's so many photons (energy) at higher power levels (there is a cut-off for the emission, but I've not ever looked into it) that the end result is kinetic energy overpowers everything. A .45/10mm bullet will push/throw a man backwards from the absorbed kinetic energy, but a high velocity .223 will just pass through the same target like a laser. Pressure counts.

There's actually been a few experiments done where a diamond has been suspended ('mid-air'/mid-vaccuum) against the force of gravity by a laser. Only a couple of millimeters, though.......

OK. There is a problem. We might not be talking about the same thing. A RailGun, as I know on this subject, uses ionised small particles at extremly high velocity that would puncture to most alloys that make up armor for ships, tanks and submarines (at the begining(the '60-'70), the railgun was originally intended for submarine warfare, as torpedoes and depth charges are pretty inacurate - some information leaks from the former USSR taalk about such a device mounted on a test subamrine. Of course it would been usefull against ships and tanks too, but there are cheaper weapons that do a good job). Usage of small ionised particles over larger projectiles in a liniary accelerator is preferable due to much lower energy usage. Also, there is no need for a charge inside the projectile since a tiny ball of superheated metal traveling at about 80 Mach would ignore even two times the amount of armor on a tank. Would just go right through like it was a cheese tank .


General Failure reading HDD C:
Who the f*** is General Failure and why is he reading my HDD?

EMP missiles were used by USAF against serbia. They were in parachute drop missiles, that direct a downward pointing pulse when they reach a certain altitude. There not accurate and cannot be directed precisely like a laser as used in goldeneye, but instead more of a directed explosion effect.


<font color=red><i>Tomorrow I will live, the fool does say
today itself's too late; the wise lived yesterday

I've seen the damage projectiles travelling at about 2000mph (mach 3.5 ish) does to a target and it's pretty devastating. The charge on a projectile is useful, lets say you're targeting a big ship, you only get one shot it put's a whacking great hole in the ship, if the projectile also has enough electrical charge to take out the ships ew and digital battlefield system, that ship cannot be repaired without the use of a major repair yard, just a hole could plausibly be repaired at sea. (I know people who have even cut holes in a ship to replace a turbine and then patch the ship back up, all at sea).

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Look at the size of that thing!