Keith Nagel wrote:
The problem at the moment is Jed's pitch; it made me wet my pants, but from laughter rather than fear. Killer roombas and terrorist model airplanes just ain't cutting it fellas.
It does sound comical, I admit. So did Billy Mitchell's proposal to drop bombs from biplanes onto navy ships in 1921. As Newton Backer, U.S. Sec. of War put it: "That idea is so damned nonsensical and impossible that I am willing to stand on the bridge of a battleship while that nitwit tries to hit it from the air." You have to remember, in 1921 biplanes were still rickety little canvas covered machines. In July 1921 Mitchell's aviators were allowed to attack the captured German battleship Ostfriesland, which was once considered "unsinkable." It sank within minutes.
By the way, large model airplanes are dangerous even when unarmed. They have killed and severely injured people. They can easily fly at 100 mph easily. The record is around 200 mph. With unlimited CF power, you might just build one with a sharp steel bar sticking out in front, and spear people to death. It is much more dangerous than it sounds. I am not envisioning something that looks like a scaled-down model of an airplane -- which would indeed look comical -- but rather something like a javelin or shoulder launched missile, made of aluminum, painted black, with one or two 200-watt pusher engines. 200 watts is enough power to propel me, on my bicycle, at 15 mph. A 2 kg, 200 W small flying object would probably have enough momentum to kill someone on impact. Armed with 20 rounds of small ammunition or 100 grams of Sarin gas, or a hand grenade, such a machine could kill lots of people in a short time. The thing is: it would have *unlimited* range. That is a very difficult property to imagine, or come to terms with. You could launch thousands of these gadgets anywhere in the world, and they would show up anywhere else on earth within 12 days. If it did not find a victim the first day, it could keep hunting for days or weeks. If a few thousand of these things came bearing down on people at random everywhere, every day for nine months, the nation would be reduced to utter chaos. It could be much worse than, say, the Battle of Britain civilian casualties. Between Sept. 1940 and May 1941, the Luffwaffe attacked 127 times, killing 60,000 civilians and seriously injuring 87,000 (that's 9 months, and 471 deaths per attack). If you had a few hundred thousand of these gadgets, you could accomplish that in one day, or one week, or whatever span of time suited your agenda. There would be no risk to the attackers as long as their bases remained undiscovered, and I presume they would launch the weapons from hundreds of different locations around the world. The cost in men and equipment would be microscopic compared to what the Germans paid for the Blitz. Developing effective countermeasures would take months, possibly years, and I do not think the work could even be carried in the ensuing chaos. The cost of building these things would be *far* less than making a conventional nuclear bomb from scratch, and it would be much easier to hide the production facilities, or spread it out to hundreds of different factories in China and elsewhere.
Perhaps you could even build a small jet engine, and go a lot faster, but I see no point to it. 100 mph is plenty fast.
- Jed
