[ExI] Trump on ​linear induction motors ​

spike spike66 at att.net
Thu Jun 29 21:32:10 UTC 2017


 

 

>… On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan
Subject: Re: [ExI] Trump on ​linear induction motors ​

 

On Jun 29, 2017, at 10:54 AM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com <mailto:johnkclark at gmail.com> > wrote:

 

>>…the imbecile became Presadent…John

 

>…My point is, once more, if you have this kind of power in one office or small group, expect it to be abused… Dan

 

 

 

A firsthand witness account of history might be helpful here.  

 

In the 1980s, Reagan wanted all this star wars stuff, and the military research community cheerfully obliged.  When Bush Senior took over in 1989 he issued orders to stop most of the research on ground-based ABM tech but keep on with the space based interceptor biz.  You may recall seeing video of smart pebbles, which were intercept vehicles dependent on body to body contact rather than on-board explosives.  Here’s an example of an early brilliant pebble.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E07p1qqkXls

 

They had these things working in about mid 1989 but these videos were not available to the public until much later.  I saw this one, or one a lot like it, in 1991.

 

In 1989, Bush Senior ordered most ground-based interceptor technology research halted, but the space-based research could go on, so it did.  With that research, they developed technology for interceptor vehicles which were supposed to stay on orbit.  Neither US nor the commies cared how many space-based interceptors the other guy had because they and we did the same math and came up with the same answer.  Even microscopic little Spike Jones did the math, and we all reached similar conclusions: space-based intercept wouldn’t take out enough nukes to make it worth doing.  So each told the other: go ahead.  Ground-based intercept would work eventually, but Bush Senior stopped that.

 

Mysterious?  Not really.  In 1989, we had a sane reasonable counterpart in the Kremlin: Gorbachev.  So Bush Senior negotiated with Gorby and they got a loooootta lotta agreements done before he left office at the end of 1991, which saved both nations tooooonnnns of money.

 

After Boris Yeltsin took over, there was a lot less pressure to eschew ground-based intercept.  So suddenly we had a pile of money to develop a missile capable of carrying a single brilliant pebble.  That missile today is known as THAAD.  There are other ground-based interceptors, the advanced-capability Patriot missiles and other systems, with a theoretical mission of stopping SCUD missiles and such.  Anyone who pays much attention to this sort of thing realizes that given enough of them, one could shield a city, or perhaps a small country the size of Iceland.  No, wait, Indonesia.  No, rather, Italy.  Ireland?  India?  OK I can’t recall which one I had in mind, but one of those really rich smaller countries with starts with the letter I.  You could use ground-based brilliant pebbles to protect the small, rich nation which starts with I.

 

Right at the end of Bush senior’s time in office, a bunch of the disarmament agreements he made with Gorby were put into effect, so we space guys were awash in all this military stuff we could buy for a nickel on the dollar if we could find a good use for it.  We couldn’t, so billions of dollars worth of military space stuff ended up in two enormous hangar-sized warehouses in a well-known Bay Area city.  True story.  I do mean enormous.  I don’t mean the size of those two big hangars out at Moffatt but big, located a short-enough drive from there that a prole could get stuff from salvage if she could write up a convincing justification for it.  It was a fun time to be alive for an aerospace junkie.

 

Soon after Bush’s successor took office, we could come out of the closet, for we space guys could all do the math and realize that even if space-based kinetic kill would never work, you could work out the control systems, adapt them after the fact and ground-based kinetic kill would work great.  So… we did.  Now… we have THAAD.  And Patriot.  And the others, built by those other aerospace companies whose names I forget.

 

Question: was the development of a THAAD payload under the disguise of a space-based interceptor equivalent to disregarding Bush Sr’s orders?  I would argue it depends on how you look at it.  I worked on it in good conscience.  I didn’t go blabbing around what I was doing, or that I had done the math and figured out how our brilliant pebbles would eventually be used, way back in the early 1990s.  Note that test on 31 May 2017.

 

Presidents come and go, but the military stays long-term.  If a president demands a ship be retrofitted with a steam catapult, you can be sure the military will do something, even if not exactly what he had in mind, such as create an EM cat which blows off steam during the launch.  Meanwhile the bad guys think the USNavy is investing its resources in retrofitting carriers with 1950s-era steam catapults.  Once that president is gone, the admirals order the removal of the steam bottles mounted underneath the deck, toss them overboard, life goes on.

 

spike

 

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