99+% of people think it is a rude description of cold weather, and picture an anatomically correct or exaggerated statue of a monkey, cast in brass, and the testicles some how fall off.
The truth is back in the day a monkey was a plate with round holes in it, and you could stack cast iron cannon balls in a pyramid on the holes, if the monkey was made of brass, it has a different coefficient of thermal expansion to cast iron, so when it got very cold it shrank more than the cannon balls, and the cannon balls fell off as the pyramid collapsed.
Which brings me back to the previously mentioned HD forum and the oil filter thread, for my sins I pointed out that you NEVER pre fill any kind of filter, you fit it and bleed the system to fill it, that way you abso-fucking-lutely guarantee that nothing ever ever ever goes anywhere except through the filter medium itself.
So one guy says anyone who works on tier 4 diesels will know exactly what he is on about, everyone else takes the piss, been doing it pre filled for 40 years, maybe I should ride a british bike or a horse instead, yadda yadda yadda.
Fact 1, what I said was 100% correct.
Fact 2, 99+% of people pre fill the filter by hand.
99+% of people doing it DOESN’T MAKE IT RIGHT.
So… what can we learn from this?
well, tongue only slightly in cheek, we can learn that 99+% of people are stupid cunts, are proud of it, and have no intention whatsoever of changing any time soon.
It’s a *bit* like lasers, the science and technology isn’t actually all that hard to grep, sure, there is a whole load of real world practical stuff you’d need to learn that you possibly would not have thought of, but even that makes sense once you grep it.
So let’s look at lasers as death ray weapons, because it’s back…
Well, back when laser were just masers, some clever guy observed that creating a megawatt class laser wasn’t hard, nor was pointing it at a target, the problem was all the air in between the weaponised laser and the target, and you get something called “thermal bloom” which is like a huge muzzle blast of heat at the exit of the weapon, and bugger all energy making it down range to the target.
A notable exception to this is space of course, laser work well in a vacuum, just not a hollywood one, because they would not be green and red and blue and white, they’d all be invisible… vacuum see..
So while it is true that different frequencies have different atmospheric absorption properties, none of them are near as dammit zero, so none of them make megawatt class lasers practicable.
But, again, science, there is an exception.
You can buy commercial fibre laser modules for things like laser cutters and engravers, they tend to top out at around 100 watts so if you want 2 kw to cut thick steel you just mount 20 of them together and combine the beams, easier said than done, but still.
But, all of these fiber lasers tend to have one thing in common, you can alter the frequency of the pulses and you can alter the power of the pulses and you can do PWM etc, but you’re pretty much limited to 1 MJ per pulse.
I joule is of course 1 watt for 1 second, so a megajoule is 0.277 kwh, or 277 watts for an hour… but this is continuous power, say a third of a horsepower for an hour…. or a full horsepower for 20 minutes, or 20 horsepower for a minute, or 1,200 horsepower for a second, and my maths is drifting here, I’m about 10% low.
For reference 50 cal bmg is around 15,500 joules at the muzzle…. a one bar kilowatt fire for quarter of a minute.
So it’s a *reasonable* amount of power, and we can say that if a Bystronic 10 KW fiber laser can cut thick steel all day long, it will cut missile nose cones and jet aircraft engine pods all day long… except it won’t.
Targeting is just one issue, and you can indeed get galvo heads so fast and sensitive they can maintain a target lock on an aircraft 30,000 feet up and 60,000 feet downrange.
But without focused energy you aren’t going to do shit, and you only have to look at stars twinkling to know that focusing over large amounts of atmosphere is a *hard* problem, and it becomes n-hard when you are no longer just trying to get a sharp image for your camera, but are trying to focus a megawatt or so of laser energy, energy which is itself causing thermal bloom.
So essentially, ranged megawatt class laser weapons in atmosphere are a non starter, it’s an engineering problem akin to making a Nimitz class aircraft carrier fly… it’s not theoretically impossible, it’s just totally physically impossible and impractical.
But, when 99+% of people are assholes and want to stay that way, just say, “because science innit” and you’ll get funding to develop it and keep the pork rolling.
Or hyperloop, or small scale manned missions to mars that are only about 3x the size of Apollo, or dare I say it, draining the swamp.
I cannot speak for the USA as I do not live there, but I can speak for the UK, and it would be hugely erroneous to think that the UK swamp only extended as far as the outskirts of London.
It’s Everglades and mangroves and snowflakes all the way to the territorial waters, sure, the deepest and most primordial swamp my be Londinium only, but that shit has been spreading like cancer for 40 years, ain’t no part of this nation unaffected.
PS if this is all incoherent it’s because I am as drunk as a skunk.
Comment by hans — April 1, 2017 @ 3:22 am
Also I think the Ruskies have you beat in the drunken shit-idea department.
Comment by hans — April 2, 2017 @ 10:54 am
As your own maths shows, you don’t need Megawatt lasers to be effective weapons – a BMG round is highly effective with kJ of energy..
The US NAVY has been burning holes and blowing up targets at a distance (in the air and on water) with a 30kilowatt laser weapon system installed on USS Ponce .. since 2014. See video.
Not even getting into the utility of “dazzle” (blinding) of manned & unmanned vehicles in war.
Also: waaaaay way cheaper to fire than conventional ordnance especially versus e.g poorly armoured pirates / goatherds with AK47s
Comment by jb — April 3, 2017 @ 11:53 am
1/ a limited “demonstration” two surface vessels + curvature of the earth = limited range
2/ two surface vessels = very limited target speed or vector changes
3/ the “target damage” very briefly visible at 0:59 seconds is not consistent with a laser.
4/ the “weapon” itself pans around like a home hobby robot or a manually controlled camera mount, servo controlled systems just don’t move like that, and they just don’t move that slow.
5/ a youtube video by itself proves nothing, video is easy to fake and easy to claim it is something other than what it is.
The metal plate shows clear deformation, either from a projectile or from an attached charge, I can easily belive a set up target complete with an attached charge that only needed a laser beam to raise the temp to an ignition point on a primer, there are a lot of things that that is, but a laser weapon is one of the things it is not.
And finally esther, in the video there is a water splash a couple of hundred yards to the right of the frame, port side of the target, that can only be caused by a solid object travelling at some speed, a laser beam is a massless beam, not a solid object.
The brief flare visible in the video is consistent with other laser weapon videos that I have seen, and is nconcurrent with my primer / explosive ignition hypothesis above, I’ll see you and raise you with another entirely arbitrary and entirely ficticious scenario for a real world test, and despite the hype and claims you can see it *barely* gets through the thin sheet metal of a car bonnet and “mission accomplished” is cooking the electronics underneath and killing the engine… No actual range is given, note that the vehcile has to be both stationary and elevated to maintain any kind of target lock, and note that unlike the rest of the body panels of the vehicle the bonnet has again been pre-prepped, another “demonstration” that would be easy to fake with a primer compound of some sort and a thermite compound of some sort, all dressed up to look like old paint.
Comment by wimminz — April 3, 2017 @ 3:02 pm
also it was a clear dry day with limited humidity…. you never see this shit demonstrated on days with high humidity or even rain.
I operate a laser daily, the beam produced is the same in properties as this stuff, I can *measure* the power absorbed by the atmosphere on a humid day as opposed to a dry day, and beam travel really doesn’t exceed two metres.
Comment by wimminz — April 3, 2017 @ 3:05 pm
Comment by wimminz — April 3, 2017 @ 3:06 pm
Hmm, I don’t remember Dad telling me to ever pre-fill a filter or not when I was a kid. I guess we were just so ignorant that the idea of prefilling didn’t even cross our minds. Now, I WAS told to rub a thin coating of fresh oil on the rubber seal of the filter, I guess the idea was that you’d have an easier time of tightening the new filter on. I’ve never had any leaks after doing an oil change so I guess it didn’t hurt anything. You’re the expert though. Am I a cunt if I apply a thin coating of oil onto the rubber seal of a filter?
Comment by Michael — April 4, 2017 @ 8:11 pm
Nope, absolutely not…
1/ ***ALWAYS*** ensure that the old O ring came off with the filter, ALL of it.
2/ ***ALWAYS*** wipe some oil on the new O ring to help it seal and seat.
3/ ***ALWAYS*** double check it with the engine running and a paper towel to ensure there are zero leaks
*GOOD* oil changed *REGULARLY* with the filter is the cheapest and best engineering maintenance you can do in an engine, even if you do nothing else good filters and a good oil like mobil 1 changed every 5000 miles will save you far more money than it will ever cost
Comment by wimminz — April 4, 2017 @ 9:03 pm