Posts Tagged ‘weapons’
Video: Railgun Blasts an Aerodynamic Round Seven Kilometers Through A Steel Plate
Older railgun projectiles tumbled through the air; this one flies with what can only be called grace
This amazing video, created by , shows the latest test of General Atomics' high-speed railgun. Where earlier attempts have fired ungainly missiles that tumbled end-over-end through the air like "hypersonic bricks," this one uses a sabot round, which flies straight and smoothly for a distance of seven kilometers, AFTER punching through a solid steel plate.
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From NACHOS to MAHEM: Naming The World’s Most Advanced Military Tech
What's in a name? For DARPA, acronyms are more than just shorthand
At the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the military’s mad-science research wing, program managers must do the seemingly impossible. Not just and make . They also have to describe these pie-in-the-sky ideas to journalists, the public and Congress.
That’s how you get some of the most amusing acronyms ever.
Check out our gallery of classic DARPA names by clicking .
Nanoscale laser systems, snore. But NACHOS — now there’s something to pique anyone’s interest!
From the precursors of the Internet to the latest stealth technology, DARPA specializes in the world of the future. Speaking to members of Congress last spring, Dr. Regina Dugan, the agency director, described her cohorts as "the nation’s elite army of futuristic technogeeks."
"We challenge existing perspectives, break glass, and make people excited and uncomfortable, sometimes with the same sentence," she said. DARPA has six program offices, but its scientists rely heavily on partnerships with universities and private contractors, which range from behemoths like Boeing and Lockheed Martin to small firms like Robotic Technology Inc.
The projects are often deadly serious, but the acronyms are sometimes silly, descriptive, and very memorable. The best ones are a combination of all three — so says Robert Finkelstein, president of Robotic Technology Inc., maker of EATR. That’s
">“Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot.” Finkelstein said he’s as proud of this name as any he’s come up with in his long acronym-heavy career, which dates to his service as an Army weapons analyst in the 1960s.
“Every once in a while, we would develop or design a new system or a concept that needed a name, and we’d try to come up with an acronym that the words would encompass what it did, and the acronym would be on point and relevant to what the system did, or some characteristic or function of the system,” he said.
It’s like playing a reverse form of Scrabble — first, Finkelstein writes down all the words that may describe the system or be relevant in some way. Then he looks at all the words’ first letters, and tries to combine them into a new word that makes sense.
“Sometimes you’re lucky and something particularly good pops out, like EATR. For something that forages and consumes vegetation, that’s the essence of its unique nature,” he said.
Armed forces acronyms and abbreviations are as old as organized militaries themselves; the ancient Greeks and Romans used them (e.g., SPQR, an albeit unpronounceable acronym for the "Senate and people of Rome"). Sometimes it’s just more convenient to make up a word, like radar, rather than say a whole phrase, like “radio detection and ranging.”
Though they may be silly, the point of acronyms is explication, says DARPA. The agency’s programs are often highly theoretical, complex or unusual, so they can be hard to explain in just a couple words, explains Eric Mazzacone, DARPA’s chief public affairs officer. He said in an e-mail that program managers seek input from their teams, and they try to come up with descriptive names.
“Due to the often lengthy nature of those descriptive names, for example, acronyms are typically created from those names,” he said.
Sometimes, the results are awesome names like MAHEM, for , an armor-penetrating hydrodynamic metal jet straight out of Arthur C. Clarke. Fire this weapon at an enemy tank, and mayhem will ensue.
But plenty of other project names appear to be reverse-engineered to be YABA-compatible (that’s Yet Another Bloody Acronym, readers). Like . In 2008, DARPA started a program involving descriptions of battlefield events, medical records, autopsy results, and predictive algorithms to recreate the scene of a trauma. They called it REstoring SURvivability by REConstructing Trauma.
A dynamic dual project from last year takes the cake: BaTMAN-and-RoBIN, which stands for Biochronicity and Temporal Mechanisms Arising in Nature, and Robustness of Biologically-Inspired Networks. The program would leverage basic biology as a tool for situational awareness — kind of like some superheroes. Though absurd, these names are sort of relevant, which Finkelstein may be better than NACHOS.
“If you have the words that describe the system well, but an acronym that doesn’t mean anything or isn’t relevant to some aspect of the system, then it’s very weak,” he said. “With NACHOS, at least it’s a mnemonic way to remember the system, but it’s not as good as when it spells to some characteristic or functional ability of the system itself.”
DARPA has six branches, each of which focuses on a specific area of research. The Microsystems Technology Office, for instance, develops chip-based photonics, electronics, microelectromechanical systems and more. MTO also has some of the most fun with its project names, from ASP (Analog Spectral Processors) to TROPHY (Transmit and Receive Optimized Photonics). There are even acronyms-within-acronyms, like ChaSER (Channelized SIGINT and ELINT Receiver for UAV Applications).
Acronyms can even add heft to a project, as evidenced by the controversies that ensue when they’re changed. Last summer, Defense Secretary Robert Gates recommended renaming the country’s psychological operations — PSYOPS — to Military Information Support Operations (MISO), partly to reduce the program’s stigma. But some soldiers weren’t thrilled, commenting on various military blogs that the change directly undermined the program’s mission.
“Some of us joined Psychological Operations because it sounded awesome for its name alone,” an anonymous four-year PSYOP soldier wrote on the website . “The intimidation factor brought on by the words alone are what attracts many recruits ... Maybe you should have done what a PSYOP soldier does and pre-test the name first before freaking changing it.”
Americans have always liked acronyms and abbreviations, well before the Internet gave letter-strings like LOL and WTF entirely new meanings. The New Deal and World War II era saw a rapid increase in the use of acronyms. But nowhere are they more prevalent than in the Department of Defense. Some non-DARPA programs also have great acronyms — the Air Force’s flightless , for one.
Decades ago, Finkelstein worked on a stealth system that allowed a tank or other vehicle to be obscured by smoke at the push of a button, and he came up with the name “Dense and Rapid Protector-Emitter of Smoke.” DRAPES.
“That was also focused on what the thing did,” Finkelstein recalled, with a bit of pride. Later, he came up with “Surreptitious Hierarchical Autonomous Robotic Submarine” — SHARCS. His program managers later changed it, however. Along with continued research on EATR, he’s started developing a new concept involving a tactical ground-air robotic system called TIGARS, for Tactical Intelligence Ground-Air Robotic System.
“It involves robotic air vehicles and ground vehicles that work together to communicate in a collective. The words are descriptive, the acronym TIGARS indicates a ferocious creature, but it doesn’t quite cover the things in the air part. It’s focused on the ground stuff. Tigers don’t fly yet, so that’s not quite as good as EATR,” he said. Still, it's pretty good.
A Sensor That Tracks Cosmic Particles Could Spot Hidden Nuclear Threats Before They Cross Our Borders
Only a few percent of the 15 million or so cargo containers that enter the country every year are screened for nukes, a number that Congress mandates must be 100 percent by 2012. That benchmark is impractical using today’s tech, however. Standard detectors can miss nuclear material hidden behind lead or steel, and naturally radioactive cargo such as kitty litter gives false positives, requiring a labor-intensive hand-search.
A new detector from Decision Sciences, a security company in California, sees through anything and can scan a semi in less than a minute. It tracks muons, cosmic particles constantly bombarding Earth. Muons penetrate everything but are deflected more by heavy atoms such as uranium and plutonium. The detector tracks these deflections.
The company finished lab tests this spring and is now building detectors to deploy at several ports in the next year. “As long as it works quickly enough, it should fit the bill,” says Robert Dynes, a physicist at the University of California at San Diego who reviewed radiation detectors for Homeland Security. Tests indicate that the device should be speedy on real cargo, says Decision Sciences’s chief technology officer, Allan Wegner. And it’s nearly foolproof. Wegner can’t go into detail about its weaknesses (for obvious reasons), but he assures us that kitty litter and watermelons will no longer threaten national security.
How It Works
As muons come from the sky, they pass through the top detector, the truck and the bottom detector. The muons create ionization trails in the scanner's gas-filled detector tubes, which sensors record.
Heavy atoms, such as uranium and plutonium, deflect muons more than lighter ones do. If the angles of muons' entrance and exit paths vary by a wide magin, nuclear material could be present.
The detector also senses gamma radiation, which the computer combines with muon data to build a 3D view of suspicious muon-scattering objects, alerting customs agents exactly where to search.
Wax-Powered Heat Storage Is Key to General Atomics’ Next-Gen Directed Energy Weapons
Directed energy weapons -- the laser weapons of the future -- have shown promise in both their power and their precision. But there are some serious technological challenges involved in weaponizing devices like powerful chemical lasers, not least of which is dealing with the vast amounts of waste heat they generate. General Atomics recently tested a that might just overcome that hurdle, opening the door to the next generation of energy weapons.
The 3-megajoule, 35-kilogram module stores all that excess heat by melting a waxy phase-change material augmented by a variety of other thermal materials. What exactly these materials are seems to be a trade secret at this point, but by allowing that heat energy to be consumed by melting that waxy substance, the device can pull 230 kilowatts of heat away from the primary weapon. "To put it into perspective, it's the equivalent of melting about 20 pounds of ice in 13 seconds," said Dr. Paul Clark, a manager in Advanced Power Systems at General Atomics, in a press release.
That's a good deal of heat, and being able to successfully pull it out of the weapon and store it could benefit both high-powered laser devices and microwave devices, which are both candidates for directed energy weapons. It will be interesting to see if engineers can figure out a constructive use for all that stored wasted heat, perhaps using it to power vehicle systems for mobile DEW platforms or returning energy to the weapons systems themselves.
We've seen phase-change materials used for their energy-management skills in applications like , , and . So why not lasers?
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A Variable Velocity Rifle That Puts the ‘Less’ in ‘Less-Lethal’
Lund Technologies – designers of the fuzzy red Sesame Street doll that incited parents to riot a few years back – are pitching the LVVWS as an all-in-one weapon for law enforcement or military operating in situations where the circumstances, and the level of necessary force, can change on a dime.
“Less-lethal,” of course, is a term that replaced “non-lethal” because it turns out most rounds being billed as non-lethal – like rubber bullets for instance – are actually quite fatal at close range. Too keep less-lethal intentions from turning into lethal actions, the LVVWS is equipped with a range finder that locates the target and calculates distance; if the shooter is working in less-lethal mode, the rifle ratchets down the muzzle velocity of the round, maintaining its less-lethal status even in close quarters.
The concept of swapping between lethal and non-lethal force in urban environments where civilians may be present is attractive to a Pentagon that loses a PR battle each time a civilian in Iraq or Afghanistan gets caught in the crossfire. But in reality, a weapon like the LVVWS is likely a long way away from being service ready.
For one, gunpowder is a time-tested portable, combustible that, if kept dry, has reliably served infantrymen for centuries; we’re not so sure the same can be said for compressed gas cartridges. But more importantly, while range is usually a big factor when less-lethal rounds turn deadly, it’s certainly not the only one. The mass of the target, the placement of the shot and the physical condition of the target invite more variables into the equation that the LVVWS can’t address. Not to mention, as points out, a weapon that easily switches between less-lethal and “kill-you-dead” invites the kinds of mistakes that can be irreversible.
You can see the LVVWS in action here.
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