Boeing 2cnd largest weapons manufacturers. (english)
profrv@etc 4:25am Sun Feb 2 '03
article#233402
Boeing is the second largest weapons producer in the United States. ...
The United States Govt had plans once to murder a famous and popular
astronaut to set off a 'just' war...
I am not into conspiracism,just collating certain information.
Boeing considers feasibility of plasma-based weapons
NICK COOK JDW Aerospace Consultant
London
The Phantom Works, Boeing's prototyping organisation, has raised the
possibility of plasma-based directed-energy weapons equipping a future
breed of hypersonic aircraft platforms, such as those favoured for research
and development by the Bush administration.
George Muellner, vice president and general manager of the Phantom Works,
said that it should prove feasible to "skim off" some of the plasma that
forms naturally around a M8.0 aerospace vehicle for use by an onboard
directed-energy weapon.
Plasmas are ionised gases found naturally in lightning discharges and are
commonly used in neon light tubes. They also build around the nose and
leading edges of hypersonic vehicles and space re-entry systems as the air
in front of them is shocked to high temperature.
Muellner's remarks are evidence of growing US interest in plasmas for a
variety of aerospace applications. Russian designers have touted the
benefits of plasmas for years, but officially their claims have been
greeted with scepticism by the US aerospace establishment.
Russian companies and research institutions that have applied plasmas to
aircraft have reported sizeable reductions in aircraft drag and the delayed
onset of shock waves. "We've been doing work with the Russians and we've
been doing plasma work on our own and we have seen considerable
improvements in drag and sonic boom attenuation," Muellner said.
He downplayed US enthusiasm for other plasma benefit claimed by the
Russians - a means of drastically reducing an aircraft's radar signature.
"There's no way to effectively engineer it," he said, adding that the power
and weight penalties imposed by plasma-generators would most likely
outweigh the stealth benefits. Despite this, Russian engineers claim to
have developed 'bolt-on' plasma-generators that dramatically cut an
aircraft's radar cross-section while preserving its aerodynamic qualities;
something, they say, that cannot be said of first-generation US stealth
aircraft like the angular F-117A.
Muellner said that the use of naturally forming plasmas on a high-Mach
aerospace vehicle could, in the long term, be applied "as a huge energy
resource" to a directed-energy weapon for self-defence purposes. Observers
have pointed out that such weapons could also be used offensively.
There are two possible engineering approaches. One is to divert the plasma
into a chamber, excite it, introduce a laser-critical gas such as argon and
direct the resultant energy through high-power optics as a laser beam. The
other is to wrap small compact rings or 'toroids' of plasma energy in
intense magnetic fields and fire them from a weapon as 'bullets' at air or
ground targets.
In the early 1990s, the US Air Force was preparing tests at Kirtland Air
Force Base, New Mexico, designed to lead to a ground-based plasma-weapon in
the late 1990s capable of firing plasma bullets at incoming ballistic
missile warheads. The enabling technology was a 'fast capacitor bank'
called Shiva Star that could store 10 million joules of energy and release
it instantaneously. Officials anticipated firing bullets at 3,000km/sec in
1995 and 10,000km/sec - 3% of the speed of light - by the turn of the
century. The tests absorbed little more than a few million dollars of
annual funding (Jane's Defence Weekly 29 July 1998).
Dumped into the 'soft' electronics of a re-entry vehicle, the bullets were
envisaged as destroying multiple manoeuvring warheads at rapid
reacquisition rates. By the second half of the last decade, the
Shiva/plasma bullet programme was officially dropped. Observers have
remarked on how its sudden disappearance at the time the firing tests were
scheduled was redolent of a transition to the classified environment.
http://www.janes.com/defence/air_forces/news/jdw/jdw010328_1_n.shtml
When we are all kept in the dark and fed on bullshit then it's only safe to
assume the worst of the powermad criminals leeching off us.
A great cypherpunk once said,"You can fuck with some of the people some of
the time,but the day you start to fuck with all of the people all of the
time is the day you go home in a body bag or a pine box."
That day just got a lot closer.
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=233402&group=webcast
