Unimaginable Destruction

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16339-us-police-could-get-pain-beam-weapons.html

These kinds of weapons are in the news all the time so it isn’t that special, but check that laser rifle picture.

That’s probably the coolest looking, actually working personal weapon I’ve ever seen. Looks like something straight out of a scifi film.

During the last few years I don’t think any category of weapons has been in the news as much as directed-energy weapons (DEWs). Some people might’ve gotten bored with it already, but I sure haven’t. So:

Airborn Laser lets rip of it’s first target

Well ok, the laser wasn’t technically airborn as the plane was on supports a few meters off the ground but apparently this was the first firing of a laser that has been actually fitted on a plane. There’s a lot of optimization to be done but the United States doesn’t appear to be too far off from being fully able to shoot down missiles, satellites or just about anything that happens to have made it off the ground.

Company tries to get gun classed as medical device.

No matter how old or weak you get you should always be able to reach out and shoot someone. Cheaply too.

“It’s something that they need to assist them in daily living,” says Matthew Carmel, president of Constitution Arms in Maplewood, New Jersey, which hopes to manufacture the Palm Pistol – now just a patent and specifications.

“Damn kids, get off my lawn or I’m gonna bust a cap in yo ass!” I guess that’s daily living. God bless America.

“Plans for a new generation of intelligent cluster bombs that pick out and chase their targets have worried experts.”

That’s OK though. It’s not like there will be any other more prominent cases where it’s just a computer deciding who will live or die. For example I’m sure there won’t be a huge military supercomputer with control over, let’s say, the whole U.S. nuclear arsenal. And even if there was I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t send robots back in time to kill us… right?

As you may have noticed I like destruction quite a bit. Sadly, I believe that the LHC will not destroy the Earth. Actually I’m not even that hopeful about it leaving a 1000km crater in the middle of Europe. Meh.

However, if there’s one thing I like besides destruction it’s food, and especially pizza.
But how long would it take for the LHC to defrost a pizza?

About 30 nanoseconds it seems. That’s pretty cool (but the pizza will be damn hot). Makes me wonder why those physicists in Half-Life even had a microwave in the Black Mesa break room.

What is it with the U.S. army and lasers? Just a few weeks ago an aircraft-mounted laser was in the news and now this:

“US army has laser guns in its sights”

“LASER weapons mounted on trucks could be ready to roll into battle within five years. This week Boeing won a $36 million contract from the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command to build the optics needed to track and focus lethal laser energy onto rockets, artillery shells and mortar rounds. The High Energy Laser Technology Demonstrator will use a new solid-state laser powered by electricity from a truck-mounted diesel generator, rather than bulky and dangerous chemicals.”

Since laser weapons seem to be so popular today, let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of laser weapons.
Pros: -When the targeting systems get better and better lasers will become extremely accurate as they hit their targets a lot faster than any projectile weapon. Basically the only way to avoid getting at least partially vaporized is to have some sort of armor surface that reflects most of the energy.
-No need for conventional ammo. All you need is electricity.
Cons: -Air plasma breakdown; “blooming”. When this happens lots of the laser’s energy is dispersed into the atmosphere. There are ways to counter this however, such as firing extremely short pulses.
-Shading of the target by evaporated target material. Again, lots of energy is lost when there’s a cloud of plasma in the way.

Currently lasers are very clumsy weapons but I’d imagine that in a couple of decades laser technology has improved enough for very powerful weapons indeed. And should humankind last long enough to do battle in space there’s no weapon like the laser.

US boasts of laser weapon’s ‘plausible deniability’

“An airborne laser weapon dubbed the “long-range blowtorch” has the added benefit that the US could convincingly deny any involvement with the destruction it causes, say senior officials of the US Air Force (USAF).

–can deliver the heat of a blowtorch with a range of 20 kilometres, depending on conditions. That range is great enough that the aircraft carrying it might not be seen, especially at night.”

If there’s something I can rely on destruction-wise these days it’s the good ol’ United States and their wacky military antics! At least the next time you spontaneously combust when you step out of the door you’ll know what it’s about.

Toy rocket inspires variable-speed bullets

“Bruce Lund, the company’s CEO, says the gun works by mixing a liquid or gaseous fuel with air in a combustion chamber behind the bullet. This determines the explosive capability of the propellant and consequently the velocity of the bullet as it leaves the gun. “Projectile velocity varies from non-lethal at 10 metres, to lethal at 100 metres or more, as desired,” says Lund.” I thought this was old news though? At least fuel-air propelled projectiles aren’t anything new, I suppose the possibility to alter the composition for each individual shot is something that took years to come up with…

Now then. I must apologize as this has very little to do with intended destruction but at least it might have remotely something to do with accidental killings. And anyway a toy company that starts working on weapons is something we can all enjoy, and once again proves how nothing is holy to this creature called man and that we will all burn in a bright nuclear inferno and how our planet will soon enough be a DARK AND BARREN WASTELAND, BATHED IN RADIATION AND…

Where was I?

There hasn’t been anything major destruction related going on lately, except for the old boring stuff. Although I do admit that the ban on cluster bombs might be a good thing, destruction wise. Now that you can’t carpet an area with cluster bombs, practically the only way to go about it is just use a bomb big enough to convert said area into a smoking crater. Being converted into vapor is much less painful than lying on the ground, slowly bleeding to death as your legs were cut off by cluster bomb shrapnel.

Since I’m bored out of my destruction craving mind, I decided to look into the past. All the way back to year 2000. Well, actually it has been discussed for decades. What I’m talking about here, is orbital, or space weaponry. Some years back we learned that the Bush administration had plans about weaponizing space. Whoah, big surprise there. Hey wait a minute! It’s still the same old boring stuff, the bombs/missiles just come from orbit! Well yes, the projectiles do come from orbit but they aren’t necessarily conventional nuclear or explosive weapons. What I’m most interested in is kinetic bombardment, perhaps even relativistic bombardment in the very distant future. Heavy metal rods from the sky, now that’s brutal.

Perhaps you’ve read one of those science magazines that always refer to asteroids exploding with the power of hundreds, even many thousands of atomic bombs should they hit earth. And they do that for mostly one reason: Their immense kinetic energy. I’m not going to bore you with calculations, so you’ll just have to trust me that a large tungsten rod from high orbit has so much kinetic energy that the impact event is comparable to small nuclear weapons, and there is no radioactive fallout. The rods themselves won’t be very easy to detect, and due to their enormous velocity they are practically impossible to shoot down with anti-missile weapons. And the rods are extremely effective for destroying bunkers or underground targets. If nuclear weapons are ultimately banned completely (which isn’t likely to happen any time soon though) and no additional space weapon banning treaty is passed, orbital kinetic weaponry might be pursued by nations with the needed resources such as the United States, Russia or China. There are problems with weapons like this though; one of them being the erosion of the rods as they gradually turn into plasma from the intense heat created by atmospheric friction.

If we look to the distant future where men are probably killing men on other planets, we can start thinking about “relativistic impact weaponry”. Imagine a planet with a thin atmosphere, and an object (perhaps a rocket) traveling at a ridiculous speed. Again, I won’t bore you with calculations (although they can be quite impressive sometimes). However, I’m going to rudely copy-paste from Wikipedia:

“A 1kg mass traveling at 99% of the speed of light would have a kinetic energy of 5.47×10^17 joules. In explosive terms, it would be equal to 132 megatons of TNT.” That’s quite a bit more than any nuclear weapon so far. And it’s just an inert projectile, a metal rod for example.

A 1kg projectile at 0.99c doesn’t sound very practical though, but you can always cut some of the velocity and use a heavier projectile for equal kinetic energy. The energy in these kind of projectiles is truly astonishing, even a 1kg matter 1kg antimatter annihilation doesn’t produce as much energy as the 132 megaton explosion mentioned above. Wait, why would someone want to bombard a planet with these sorts of projectiles rather than carpet the surface with nuclear warheads? One reason springs to mind: Because it’s freaking awesome.

Greetings. I am Gilded and this is my blog of Unimaginable Destruction. I’ll try to keep up with technology, chemistry and physics news to bring you the latest info concerning new techniques that governments or research facilities have developed to, well, kill people or to blow stuff up. You will also be provided with speculations by yours truly, regarding whether some new scientific discovery could be used for some sort of general mayhem or perhaps to disintegrate entire continents. Enjoy.