Reality Askew

One of the greatest threats to any country is an air detonated nuclear blast. The reason this is so deadly is the resulting EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse) which essentially fries electronics, specifically chips.

So here’s the pitch, if you wanted to protect, say an aircraft carrier, from any airborne threat, say cruise missle, why not put up an EMP type shield to essentially fry any incoming threats? Imagine replacing the current Phalanx system (gatling gun) with one that shoots emp pulses in front of approaching threats.

So I was watching a video on a new Russian submarine being referred to as the Black Hole, due to it’s uncanny ability to avoid detection using typical underwater sound related methods. So this got me to thinking, isn’t the use of sound as a mechanism to find something underwater so 1945? What about using something a tad more modern like say laser? Couldn’t you theoretically use a laser (in a wide beam) to scan a section of water and when it detected a blank space, where no water existed, it could then narrow it’s beams to render the void into a 3d model or sorts? Water good, no water……nope fish. Water good, no water….submarine BAD. Also this sort of scanning might enable the scanner to not reveal their location or even that fact that they were scanning in the first place.

Thinking more, I wonder how well lasers work under water? Maybe the final solution wouldn’t involve the use of lasers at all, but instead some other technology.

So I was reading something about tanks and the new types of armor they have to combat the new advances in weapons.  However I was struck by how basic the thought process seems to be, big tanks, bigger bullets needed.

So it got me to thinking, why not a simple projectile that, upon impact, emits a concentrated EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse)?  Since most tanks are fully computerized, this would effectively render it useless, right?  With the added benefit that all of the vehicles communications systems stop functioning too.  So you’ve got a disabled tank that can’t talk to anyone.

Given weapons, vehicles, even airplanes are becoming more remote controlled or autonomous, this seems like a natural progression in weapons.

So had this idea of a substance that could run between the layers of say armor on a tank.  It would remain in a gelatinous state until exposed to oxygen and then immediately harden.  So if a tank or armored vehicle were attacked, the holes would automatically fill in and become solid again.  To keep the system ready, you could simply refill the glue/gel reservoir.

This same system could be used on aircraft wings to repair damage to wings and control surfaces.  There could even be a laser matrix projected grid over the surface that the glue/gel would use as a guide for the repair.

Of course the implications for space would be great except for that whole oxygen catalyst thing.  Maybe the stuff for space would trigger on lack of oxygen or cold?

In typical fashion I woke up this morning with an interesting thought; what if an alien race appeared and brought us a gift of technology, something such as teleportation.  What if it wasn’t a gift but a crashed ship and the only thing remaining were two teleportation chambers.  Scientists would have just enough technological know-how to replicate them, all the time patting themselves on the back for being so clever.  Humanity would trip over themselves to put teleportation devices on every corner of the world.  We would likely do this without fully understanding how it worked.  Sure teleportation would be amazing but it would likely take us several decades to fully understand how it worked, if ever. But what if this “gift” were in fact a Trojan horse of the worst kind.  Imagine every time you use the device the alien race were replacing a few atoms with their own.  Ever so gradually we would start becoming like them.  This change, gradually introduced over time, might be so slow it would be chocked up to some quirk in evolution.

I was watching the movie Lone Survivor the other day where the Seal team was stuck in a major firefight in Afghanistan on some god forsaken hill.  The part that struck me was the damage those guys took from bullet wounds and kept going.  Simply amazing.

But my thought this morning (love those waking up ideas) was why can’t we develop some sort of light weight material that is either completely bullet proof or slows the bullet down significantly?  Sure the former would be best but might not be entirely possible.  The material I had in mind would be some sort of composite with overlapping layers on a molecular level.  I mean imagine taking something as strong as say a spiders web and figuring out how to do the same thing but infinitely smaller and tighter.  The ultimate goal would be to create a material like spandex that is light-weight but almost impervious to bullets and shrapnel.

Typical manufacturing concepts wouldn’t work given the composition of this.  Instead I would imagine it would have to be poured into a mold of some sort.  To maximize comfort/functionality you would likely do a body scan of the recipient and then the mold would be an exact fit.

What if you could also generate power from the wearers body heat and then convert that into electricity?  This could conceivably power anything from a communication/navigation device to  some sort of body regulating medical device.

I read something the other day that said we were almost at the point where people could control things by thinking of them.  For instance, you place a device on your head and it reads your brainwaves/electronic pulses and when you think “play music” it could translate that and actually tell a media device to play.

Now take that a step (more like jog) forward and why couldn’t we develop a device that can read someone’s thoughts from a distance?  At first this would likely be pictures or interpretations of pictures and sounds based on patterns the devices detect.  This would likely be accomplished with the use of some sort of directed laser (love lasers :) ).  Actually the first prototypes would probably need more than one laser triangulated on target.  Future versions would be able to do the same thing using some sort of spread spectrum thing based on cranial shape, size, etc. If you combined the laser aspect with say maybe inverse sound waves you might get a better resolution of picture/sound?

Imagine the implications this would have on human intelligence gathering (HUMINT) by a country’s intelligence apparatus.  Actually kind of scary if you think about it.  Maybe this is one of those things that shouldn’t be.

Then again what an amazing tool for law enforcement.  Instead of hooking a suspect up to a stupid lie detector machine (archaic and ancient) they could just sit them in a special room, ask them questions and see what the person remembers of the incident.  Not only could they ascertain someone’s guilt or innocence but they could also pull that one piece of critical information from a witness, say a license plate that the witness didn’t even remember seeing.

The worst part is once this is a reality, someone will ultimately figure out how to reverse the damned thing and push pictures, sound (false memories) out to people rather than collecting it. Bad thing.

Was listening to an audio book on the way to work the other day dealing with a fictional military battle and it got me to thinking.  In the book there is a great deal of vehicles (Tanks, Infantry Fighting Vehicles, Artillery, etc.) that are being attacked primarily by aircraft.  However a lot of the attacks rely on the attacking aircraft keeping eyes on the target.  So my thought was what if you could develop a laser type weapon that would somehow paint a target in such a way that it would leave a radiating patch on it that a weapon system could home in on.  By radiating patch, I mean, for instance, the top of a tank would get zapped by this laser type device (maybe even from space?) and that would leave a round area on the top of the tank that a weapon system could lock on to.  In my scenario the laser device “paints” the target once and then moves on to the next one, leaving behind this area that sort of glows or radiates.  Unlike current targeting system, the laser wouldn’t have to stay on the target for it to be illuminated.  I know that’s sort of rambling but I want to be clear on how I envision this working.  Maybe you could somehow project radioactive isotopes down a laser beam and have them splatter on a target?

Don’t ask me why but for some reason I get most of my ideas when I’m in that realm between sleep and waking.  Last night was no exception and at 2am I found myself contemplating submarine defense systems.  In particular anti-torpedo defenses.  Currently submarines rely on countermeasures that involve decoys, bubble barriers, etc.  Besides thinking that the very idea of a torpedo (cigar shaped tube with explosives) is primitive, it occured to me that one might be able to simply fire off some sort of remote controled net in the path of the oncoming torpedo that would snare it.  Once snared the net could employ either an electrical charge or small explosive to destroy the torpedo or at the very least render it ineffective.

A more sophisticated idea would be to have some sort of electronic countermeasures that fry the brains of the torpedo.  Like a highly focused energy beam?  Of course the problem with that is the natural barrier the water presents.  But if one could fire the beam inside of a very narrow bubble tube maybe?

Now go way outside the realm of possibility and figure out a way to manipulate water density and one might therorectically be able to just crush the torpedo from afar.  This one I like the best but I don’t see us having the ability to do this any time soon.

Update:  Thinking of defenses got me to thinking of offensive weapons.  Enemy ships and submarines are alerted to incoming torpedoes primarily based on the sound from the propellers, so why not develop a propulsion system like flipper on a seal?  The noise would either be silent or mimic an animal.  The explosive, tracking , or eavesdropping device could then operate almost completely undetected.

I woke up the other day and this idea was the driving force behind me creating this website.  That and the fact that I have a thousand little ideas cluttering the limited space between my ears.  Hopefully writing them down will help clear out the cobwebs in my mind.

We have lasers that can tell us the distance to a target but to me that seems incredibly limited given modern technology.  Why not a laser beam combined with a small built-in computer that can calculate all of the other variables that go into a successful first hit?  Here are the things this hypothetical scope could do:

•  Calculate wind speed the entire distance of the projectile.  It’s one thing to have a wind measurement at the location of the rifle but quite another to contemplate the whole distance.  So how to do this?  My thought is to have maybe multiple beams (4-6) in very close proximity to the others.  The center beam would likely not be a beam at all but some sort of other invisible projection that would be susceptible to wind and those the change in position could be registered by the other beams.
• The multiple beams hitting the target could measure speed, direction, etc.
• All of the extra data would be calculated by the scope and a red dot would be placed on the target when the elevation and lead were appropriate for a first shot hit.
• As a bonus if you could somehow “paint” the target with a fluorescence that other scopes could pickup then you could literally paint codes on them that would identify different targets for each shooter.  This would allow multiple first shot kills simultaneously.