Parabolic arc had this piece and graphic, cooooool.
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Category Archives: Future
Lethal load out
Containerized missile launchers would give amphibious warfare ships a new way to protect against hostile warships, as well as engage other threats.
BY JOSEPH TREVITHICK JANUARY 11, 2021
Article in The Drive’s WarZone.
So the Naval Strike Missile, a middle weight anti ship missile will be mounted on an Amphib to provide integral defense and a little bit of offense capacity. The main purpose of this deployment is for experimentation with the fleet, to see if it changes the nature of the game when at sea. The Amphib is a big ship but is in essence a sea going ferry for the marines, a fast freighter. But these ships are big and impressive and sometimes used to show the flag. They have defensive weapons but nothing to ‘shoot the archer’ usually that is left to an escort. Having some rounds on board would change the dynamics and utility perhaps in a positive way.
While the preliminary deployment will have the missile amidships like a warship might. But the missile could be mounted on a truck that is being transported, just drive it out onto the flight deck, lock it down and shoot. With all sorts of truck mounted ordinance such as Hellfire, 155mm Cannons, HIMARS GPS Guided Rockets, there are a lot of options that this could provide for protection or force projection.
With the continued growing cost of specialized warships this sort of flexible tactical utilization looks like a good use of modern precision weapons. One can and should argue that it does not provide any kind of one for one replacement for a warship. But is a warship; a frigate, destroyer, cruiser… really what we need? Maybe its a combination of gnat weight autonomous missile slingers supporting heavy flex fighters like this Amphib.
Statite
I follow Centauri Dreams closely, it is a very good source on fascinating articles about what might be called the near universe and our ability to explore it. Dealing with the outer solar system and beyond, near future realistic interstellar exploration in all its technical gore.
A recent article (A Statite ‘Slingshot’ for Catching Interstellar Objects by PAUL GILSTER on JANUARY 5, 2021) dealt with how to intercept/flyby interstellar objects (ISO) like ‘Oumuamua’ the icicleoid. This is very much in line with Arthur C. Clark’s classic (and my near all time favorite Science Fiction) Rendezvous with Rama, about the passage of a vast interstellar space ship through Sol system and a desperate dangerous mission to intercept and explore.
With current technology this appears impossible, you’d have to plan and launch a mission with a Falcon Heavy class craft in a few months to have any kind of chance. But there is a near term possible technology that makes it almost easy. The Statite is a ‘satellite’ that uses a solar sail to ‘hover’ instead of kinetic energy to orbit. Essentially this is storing energy and either the main vehicle or a cube sat sized sub satellite can be dropped straight down the gravity well to gain the velocity required to get the flyby in time. This is REALLY COOL stuff….
Society, Xiciety, Techocracy, what next?
Too many things that I could post to be able to post anything. The reality is that we are in the crux of the flux and nothing is visible through the smoke and dust.
Many very sane people have overloaded and said things they will later regret. Some very sane people have ‘locked up’ and done the same or not said enough. At the end of the day mostly this is about living in a time when the chaos of reality overwhelms individual, and even more, group, ability to absorb and organize, let along rationalize, what is going on.
What bothers me the most is the absolute arrogance of the tech oligarchs in control of Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook. They have essentially locked out what they see as the ‘other side’ they are signaling that they feel that the opposition has no rights, utterly at odds with the ethos of the US origin. As I have noted several times one could see the US as essentially a soft focus vision of China.
The problem with the Techocracy above abbreviated would not be so savagely pernicious if it weren’t that they essentially represent de facto monopolies. While legalistically one could (and lawyers have) argued that they are not monopolies, they effectively each and every one, are, because they make it hard for the ordinary user to avoid them. As a group they absolutely are because one way or another they control 99.99 % of personal and probably >90 % of business communications.
When they collude as Google and Apple are to force 3rd parties such as Parlor and other platforms competitive with FB and Tw, to conform to some squishy leftist censoring standards they have in essence moved us closer to Xiciety. When you also see them pushing hard against anything that limits their freedom to use foreign slave and gulag labor one gets the feeling that they have seriously lost their way.
- Are the 4 evil?
- De facto, yes.
- But they are corporations, ok they have powerful CEO’s but they are American and they are teams not really individuals.
- But those teams are closed, self or leader selected, cliques from a very small ‘genetic’ head space on the west coast, with generally young and woke workforce’s enforced by the Uber woke HR departments.
- But, but they are Woke, Diverse, MultiCultural, Free Market, Open Market, MultiNational…they want freedom, civil rights!
- But that litany is not actually about freedom and civil rights beyond keeping the base population passivated. The reality is that the F&CR ‘they’ want are free this and free that and happy multicolored faces. Not the core human freedoms laid out in the Decleration of Independence and Bill of RIghts. Those core freedoms would mean that the 4 would be forced to compete, we failed years ago when it became clear the 4 were in reality a quartet.
- These ARE publicly traded multi national firms who cannot depend on the US for their profits any longer. This means they have to maintain an image acceptable to China and Europe at the very least. And both of those use the litany and talk F&CR, they use them as propaganda weapons to keep the base of the population in its place.
What next?
It is far too soon to tell. It will take weeks to get our heads around what happened. It will take months for the ramifications to start to become clear. Years to start to see the reactions, and probably a decade for the ring down. Trump did what he was hired to do, upset the apple cart, open a lot of eyes, unsettle the settled.
Who knows were this all goes. Civil War? Doubt it but it is more likely today than it was last week, or last October. Violence…who knows, could be, might not be, to be honest this does not look like a situation where the use of force has much applicability unless the Democrat/Techocracy decides that they either have the upper hand or need to strike while the iron is hot. Either mistake could lead to violence and devolve into Civil War and that would end the US as it exists today, just like the last one did.
No road leads us back to where we were at any time in the past. The tragedy is that those who think getting rid of Trump improved things are fools who did not see that 2019 may have been the best time in US history. Their butt hurt from Trumps wins forced them to break everyone’s toys.
And so we move into a future. As usual with no signposts. But now with the light of enthusiasm largely extinguished.
Photovoltaic…as I said, it’s real and getting more real.——Why the Price of New Solar Electricity Fell an Incredible 89% in the Last Decade
By Jason Dorrier – Dec 13, 2020
Spider Mite Robots from the UK
at slashgear.com
A really cool concept. Miniature walking rovers that can explore tiny spaces, a single test to the moon this year with plans for swarms (small ones) in the not too distant future. Tbe video animation from Spacebit is worth a couple of minutes.
Artificial…uh, dance partners?
Two items run across recently the emphasize the huge progress that robotics and Artificial intelligence has made in the last couple of years.
From Robot Reports a somewhat frightening video:Watch Boston Dynamics Robots Tear up the Dance Floor.
The Boston Dynamics robots are at the point that they can do most things a human can in regards to locomotion. It is unclear how much beyond balance and moving is local to the robots as the thoroughly bounded arena makes clear but the basics of the body frame is there. Ability to manipulate the environment other than in the most basic way has not been demonstrated by Boston Dynamics but other companies are making huge strides in manipulators. Ability to sense and understand the environment is another huge step. Except that the sensors exist (autonomous cars etc). Leaving understanding the environment beyond a very limited ‘world.’ And that takes a brain, and that seemed a long way off….except is it?
Hat tip Maggies Farm, in Towards Data Science: the article; GPT-3: The First Artificial General Intelligence?
The picture above shows an inverted dome with a waterfall at is base pouring water into another circular waterfall. An interesting visual metaphor for the reinforced learning of many modern AI systems.
GPT3 would appear to be on the threshold of general purpose artificial intelligence. In the article it is noted that GPT3 is a brain in a box with no ability to sense or manipulate the environment without human intervention. But ‘wrapping’ those abilities ‘around’ GPT3 appears all but trivial. Given its ability to learn on its own would a Boston Dynamic’s wrapped GPT3 become something close to the robot of our dreams and nightmares. It certainly appears so.
Atlas’s is battery powered, I think, to the tune of an hour or so. GPT3 is instantiated on a huge computer network but both of those limitations are receding every day as computing power and battery storage continue to improve driven by their broad application across the tech scene.
Five years from now it would seem likely that the general purpose android robot will be a real thing. If built in quantity like say a Tesla 3 are you looking at $30K a pop? What does that lead to?
I want to make sure they understand that I for one welcome our dancing robot overlords.
Point to point sub orbital
So this seems crazy but in all honesty it has actually been a thing for a long time. It is mentioned in a lot of sixties/seventies SF not focused on space flight. It was seriously studied several times as a sort of replacement for parachute insertion of military force. And like most of those sorts of efforts there was a commercial concept to support the technology since the folks in the defense industry understood that military programs cannot support a robust industry on its own.
Just look at nuclear power, there was a reason that nuclear power stations evolved as the Navy came to realize they wanted nuclear ships. And there is a reason that small aircraft carriers and non nuclear submarines are anathema to certain parts of the Naval establishment. They know that if non nuclear CVs and SSs became common the industry required to support the nuclear fleet would become unaffordable.
People have already talked about the DoD buying Starships and using them as bombers / hypersonic weapons platforms. This is just turning the model above around.
Back in medieval times freighters and warships were the same thing, they just tacked on some fighting platforms and went at it with bows, crossbows, catapults, swords, etc. Even the Vikings probably started out as traders though always ready to ‘raise the black flag and slit a few throats’ if that looked like the right business strategy.
Anyway…sorry for the side commentary, it’s evening and I had a good dinner so I’m wandering a bit.
So, again anyway…if you look at it, a craft like the Starship, which has the performance as a single stage vehicle to haul 100 tons 10,000 miles in less than an hour has some attraction on its face….but in reality?
- To my mind the most value dense time sensitive cargo is people but that’s years out at the least.
- In the meantime are there cargos that are so time sensitive that something like a starship might make sense?
- Couriered documents. Maybe
- Mail. Does not seem like it.
- Medical supplies only if the ship could land almost anywhere and take off again.
- High value tech like chips? Maybe but 100 tons is overkill.
- In fact most of the above are not 100 ton class cargos and frequency and flexibility of landing seem critical.
So dead on arrival? No there are customers who might pay for a a limited 100 ton capability. I think it would need to be anywhere in the world which is more than 10,000 miles but is probably within the capability of a modified Starship with more fuel and less cargo…or maybe an extended tank Starship could do 100 tons out to 18,000 miles (my wag of anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world.)
A somewhat smaller starship could do 10 tons 18,000 miles and probably land at just about any port or airfield as long as you can supply LOx and LNG, which is not that uncommon.
Go back to the start. If you burn a couple of hundred tons of LOx/LNG what is the cost? Does it make economic sense? Is it safe, is it going to be acceptable?
- Economics:
- LOx/LNG are in the same $/ton range as Jet fuel, you are burning a couple of times the fuel since you have to haul up the oxidizer with you and pay for that as well so say 4x the fuel bill.
- The hull is in line with a modern airline.
- If you can do a trip a day or so with support costs in the same range as a jet, it would appear to me that for the right cargo you could make it work.
- Is it safe?
- Well not right now but once the tech is wrung out ?? I think so.
- the big difference is much higher energies than a jet.
- But…your exposure time is a fraction of that of a jet over the same range. Accidents in mid flight are rare but generally lead to complete loss. Exposure time is probably the most important difference…advantage Point to Point
- Ok so the major threat time is when you are near the ground around take off and landing, Those are shorter for the Point to Pointer.
- And to me the difference in energy involved is immaterial…dead is dead and most of the time accidents of any magnitude in those phases are not survivable.
- Accidents on the runway often have survivors but that is eliminated in the Point to Point case…up and down…no in between…
- Acceptable?
- Only time will tell, my guess is YES.
- It will be a bit like the glamor days of the early airliners I would expect point to point for certain segments to be a real elite punch card
- Especially as near earth space becomes an exotic but achievable location.
Exciting times indeed.
Observation re. Sunburst Hack
An act of cyberwar is usually not like a bomb, which causes immediate, well-understood damage. Rather, it is more like a cancer – it’s slow to detect, difficult to eradicate, and it causes ongoing and significant damage over a long period of time. Here are five points that cybersecurity experts – the oncologists in the cancer analogy – can make with what’s known so far.
The Sunburst hack was massive and devastating – 5 observations from a cybersecurity expert by Paulo Shakarian From The Conversation
Description of who, how, what at least in general terms and a thoughtful overview of how to start thinking about the impact and meaning.
To me this attack seems just part of the reality we live in. As discussed in Modes of War, this is one of the modern modes that are more about gains and pains than blood and gore. This sort of strike, ignored and multiplied, could bring a nation down and given the context of reality today, direct kinetic action is highly unlikely.
SpaceX and COVID 19 Relief
So one of the things that has kept me a little bit sane this last 9 months is SpaceX, Starship, and 24 Falcon launches… All I have to say is WOW and thank you Elon!
I’m in the periphery of the electric car business and have been for over twenty years now. The only thing that made me a believer was Tesla.
I’ve been watching space since I sat in front of the telly as Armstrong stepped off the lunar lander. The first time I believed that the final frontier finally within grasp was watching SpaceX doggedly pursuing landing Falcon boosters.
I’ve been a big believer in sub surface transportation, in particular for cargo and rapid medium distance, since high school! And the first time I saw it really taken seriously was Elon’s Boring Company.
It is really hard to think of another great innovator who had such a broad impact in the world. Brunel maybe (Victorian England) Edison, Tesla, Marconi, the Wrights, Sikorsky, Johnson…they all did great things only Brunel had as broad as Elon Musk. Maybe some of the other engineer entrepreneurs of the 1850’s to 1950’s working in what would become industrial powerhouses might have been similar but a different time and public culture hid them…maybe it’s just that Elon’s working today and as a geek I gravitate to him and the search engines feed my observer bias.
This World and Others 