Tag Archives: military

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STARA airdrop device

Reading about this courier device puts me in mind of an event in Heavy Weather by Bruce Sterling:

To avoid the bad guys, high-flying planes can release Stara’s Mosquito. Its customizable cylinder, which can handle up to 150 pounds, contains a GPS unit and servomotor for steering the parachute to a drop site up to 2 miles away.

Actuators cut loose the payload at a preset altitude (from 50 to 1,500 feet). This way, anyone tracking the chute will end up as much as a half mile from the goods, which may be camouflaged as, say, a fist-sized rock.

The company is promoting the $10,000 Mosquito for special forces deliveries — money, passports, blood packets.

In Heavy Weather a character orders certain products which are couriered across the countryside by a monopedal robot – but the principle of ordering stuff via your satphone and having it delivered to any GPS coordinates in the world strikes me as very cool.

[on Wired][image from STARA Technologies inc]

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Missing: one nuclear bomb

Following the crash of a chrome-dome B52 bomber near a Greenland air-base in 1963 one of the aircraft’s complement of four nuclear bombs could not be found amidst the wreckage:

…declassified documents obtained by the BBC under the US Freedom of Information Act, parts of which remain classified, reveal a much darker story, which has been confirmed by individuals involved in the clear-up and those who have had access to details since.

The documents make clear that within weeks of the incident, investigators piecing together the fragments realised that only three of the weapons could be accounted for.

…

As well as the fact they contained uranium and plutonium, the abandoned weapons parts were highly sensitive because of the way in which the design, shape and amount of uranium revealed classified elements of nuclear warhead design.

[story at the BBC, via Slashdot][image from TMWolf on flickr]

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Raytheon in underwater UAV shocker

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Kudos and congrats to the US military industrial complex for continuing to output such consistently high quality James-Bondworthy widgets and gizmos. The latest is an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle from arms megacorp Raytheon that can be launched from a submarine without having to surface:

The new U-UAV is dubbed SOTHOC, for Submarine Over the Horizon Organic Capabilities. The launch system works by deploying a sealed can through the sub’s waste disposal lock. The can then sinks away safely to get clear of the boat. On reaching a preset depth it dumps weight to become positively buoyant and ascends to the surface. Once stable at the surface, it aligns itself into wind and launches a one-shot, disposable UAV.

Gawd bless America for supplying the rest of the worlds military hardware geeks with a consistent supply of goodness with no only minimal risk to our own person (unless you live in one of the Axis of Evil countries).

Peace out.

[from the Register][image from Ardyiii on flickr]

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Twitter – the newest addition to the terrorism toolbox?

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Yes, folks, you read that correctly – Twitter is becoming the latest channel for the multipronged assault on Freedom as promulgated by nebulously defined ideologues everywhere! At least that’s what the US Army intelligence types reckon, ranking Twitter and other microblogging services alongside GPS maps and voice modulation software as the latest potential tools of terror.

I think the person who submitted the story to SlashDot summed it up best: “Just wait until the Army finds out about chat rooms and email!“

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I for one, welcome our new robodog overlords…

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Obligatory shout-out to Pentagon boffins for their most recent bout of world-domineering mad-scientica. The Pentagon proposes to:

…develop a software/hardware suit that would enable a multi-robot team, together with a human operator, to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject.

According to Prof Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University:

“What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed.

We can also expect such systems to be equipped with human detection and tracking devices including sensors which detect human breath and the radio waves associated with a human heart beat. These are technologies already developed.”

Like a PACK OF DOGS I SAY! Muahahahahahaaa!

You gotta laugh, right? 😉

[from New Scientist, via KurzweilAI.net][image from this New Scientist blog post]