It’s not sexy, but here it is: a real live commercially produced laser cannon. The FIRESTRIKE system, by Northrop Grumman, is a 15 kW electric laser capable of firing continuously as long as it gets power and coolant. It’s even got en Ethernet connection, so you can zap people and surf the internet at the same time! If you’re really ambitious, you can couple up to seven of them together to make a 100 kW laser, which is just about the minimum you’d need for an effective combat system.
The downside is that each module is about 400 pounds, which unfortunately puts it well out of the handheld class. And I assume you can’t just pop a couple Duracells in there, nor does it appear to have a wall plug. But the worst part is that it’s just not evil looking. I mean, it’s a mostly featureless totally boring gray box. It really should be put inside a case that looks like something from Star Wars (the third one, with the stupidly high SFX budget), with some skull and crossbones decals on it and an absurdly gigantic barrel with lots of blinky LED lights and smoke machines and sound effects.
Oh well, I can’t find a price, and if I were Northrop Grumman, I definitely wouldn’t sell a tactical laser system to someone like me.
Oh sure, an all-metal chassis carved from a single piece of aluminum might look sleek, but I have my doubts that the latest MacBooks will survive the beating the General Dynamics (yep, the people who make tanks) Itronix GoBook MR-1 is designed to take. At just 2 pounds and 6.6 inches wide it might look like another run-of-the-mill netbook, but it’s actually engineered to meet or exceed the US Military’s MIL-STD-810F standard for drop, shock, vibration and temperature endurance. That and the $5,649 price tag definitely remove the GoBook MR-1 from the netbook category.
The GoBook MR-1’s 5.6 inch touchscreen display has a native resolution of 1024×768 and thanks to Itronix’s DynaVue screen technology it’s as viewable in direct sunlight as it is indoors. The MR-1 also features a full QWERTY keyboard that’s sealed to repel water and dust, a touchpad and a small joystick for controlling the cursor and a built-in GPS receiver, but only a single USB port on the back. However, more ports can be added via a small collection of customized docks designed for office or in-vehicle usage. While Laptop Magazine wasn’t really impressed by the performance of the MR-1’s 1.2-GHz Ultra Low Voltage Intel Core Solo U1400 processor, I guess durability is the real reason why anyone would pick one up.
Ice bullets that kill someone and then melt inside their body, destroying the evidence, may have been myth busted, but that doesn’t have to stop you from using ice bullets to chill down your favorite tasty beverage. For about $15 you can get your very own banana clip of twelve 7.62 x 39mm ice bullet molds, suitable, apparently, for making an AK-47, which you can do by combining:
1/3 oz. Bourbon Whiskey
1/3 oz. Brandy
1/3 oz. Cointreau
1/3 oz. Gin
1/3 oz. Fresh Lime Juice
1/3 oz. Rum
1/3 oz. Vodka
1/3 oz. Whiskey
Pour into a highball glass, add soda water and ice bullets to taste. Then shoot it, of course.
The University of Michigan was recently awarded a $10 million, five-year grant from the U.S. Army to develop a six inch robotic spy plane that bears a striking resemblance to a bat. In fact, the grant helped establish the U-M Center for Objective Microelectronics and Biomimetic Advanced Technology, or COM-BAT for short, re-etablishing the U.S. Army as a world leader in clever acronyms.
The COM-BAT is designed to provide short-term but real-time surveillance and feedback to soldiers in urban combat zones using a collection of sight, sound and smell sensors. One of the biggest hurdles is finding a way to give the COM-BAT a usable amount of battery life between charges, and the Army is hoping that the spy plane could scavenge power from vibrations, wind and of course the sun, which the University of Michigan has a particular expertise in. The COM-BAT project will also be used to vastly improve other existing technologies like solar cells and navigation and communication systems, which the team already feels can be dramatically reduced in size. The University of Michigan is actually one of four centers chosen by the Army for the project (the University of California at Berkeley and the University of New Mexico were also chosen) and while each school will be responsible for developing a different system on the spy plane, they’ll all be working as part of a collaborative effort.
Although you can’t buy one, the F-117A Night Hawk stealth fighter is perhaps one of the coolest gadgets to be produced in the last few decades. The entire fleet of 52 planes was informally retired on Tuesday in order to free up money for F-22 Raptors and F-35 Lightning IIs. They’re not going to be sold off to museums or scrapped or anything like that; they’ve proven their combat effectiveness and will be held in reserve in case they’re needed again at some point in the future, which is the same thing that happened to the battleship Missouri. Anyway, after the jump, I just thought I’d post some pics of this excitingly chunky, totally badass airplane. Read the rest of this entry »
If the 70 lumens produced by the K2 Porcupine’s Xenon bulb don’t blind an opponent or attacker, you can always fall back on its sharpened spikes to get the job done. Unlike those multiple D-cell Mag-Lite flashlights that require you to bludgeon someone into submission, the Porcupine takes a cue from the actual animal when it comes to self-defense. Thankfully those spikes are protected by a retractable shield so that you can carry the flashlight in your pocket or bag without having to worry about losing a finger when you reach for it.
The K2 Porcupine is available from PentagonLight for $129, but keep in mind it uses CR-123A batteries which aren’t particularly common and they’ll only power it for about 60 minutes.
If there’s one thing in the world I don’t mind doing, it’s cleaning my guns. Of course that’s most likely because I don’t actually own any guns, I’m sure if I did own one, cleaning it would be a pain in the ass. I couldn’t imagine actually sitting down to clean one, let alone 10, I’m a busy guy. Naturally, I’d opt to take the lazy way out, and buy a special dishwasher to do it for me.
The F636HT Heavy Duty Long Gun & Handgun System is a solution for those that have more guns than they have time to clean. Simply load up 10 handguns or 4 of your best long guns and you’re ready to go. You’d better do a lot of cleaning, as the system will set you back $7,100. At least you’ll be set to clean 1,000 guns before you need to reload on chemicals.
Remember how the US Navy decided that it wanted an electromagnetic railgun like two years ago? Now, they’ve got one that looks to me like it works pretty well if the above pics are any indication. Instead of using gunpowder to accelerate a shell, a railgun uses magnetic fields, which means it’s a lot less messy, and you can dump tons of juice in and get the shell going damn fast… If you’ve got a little over 10 megajoules as with this demonstration model, you’re looking at 5,600 mph. When the system is completed, it’ll be firing shells with over six times that energy (well over 13,000 mph) using 64 megajoules of energy. To give you a sense of scale, an 8 megajoule test shot has an impacting force that the Navy describes as being the equivalent of “hitting a target with a Ford Taurus at 380 mph.” Plus, the gun should be able to hit a 5 meter target from 200 nautical miles away while pumping out 10 rounds per minute.
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