This week’s CBC Web column… **** Most flowers are dead this time of year, but there’s one that only blooms in November: the poppy of Remembrance Day. King George V created Remembrance Day in 1919 in memory of members of the armed forces who were killed during war. But it’s hard to remember a war …
Tag: military
Robots with guns…
…the first armed robots in history…have now been deployed in Iraq. No, they don’t look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
How realistic are combat computer games?
Here’s an interesting interview on that topic with Dr. Malcom Davis, a lecturer in Defence Studies with the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London. Dr. Davis says current games certainly have some realistic elements, but: I think that consumer military simulations are never going to be totally realistic because ultimately people don’t really die …
Something else I should have had on my fictional ocean planet:
A 127-mph submarine!
Rise of the ray-guns
“Set phasers on stun!” Captain Kirk used to order his crew, the usual preference of the United Federation of Planets being to avoid killing aliens, no matter how bad their make-up, if at all possible. Alas, in the real world, we don’t always have that option. Aside from the Taser, which zaps people with an …
A camera that can track bullets…
…has been developed. An Air Force contractor has developed the first high-speed camera that can follow speeding bullets midflight. It may lead to “active armor” that intercepts speeding rounds out of the air, or personal-protection devices that deflect incoming bullets with rapidly inflating Kevlar air bags.Developed for the Air Force’s Munitions Directorate by Nova Sensors …
The "grizzly man" goes high tech with battle suit
Looking like something straight out of a science fiction movie, Troy Hurtubise, the Hamilton-area inventor of the bulky bear-protection suit that got a lot of attention a few years ago, is back with a high-tech (yet remarkably cheap, at $15,000 for the prototype) battle suit he’d like to see the military and police adopt. The …
Planetary defense for dummies?
Did you know there’s a book called An Introduction to Planetary Defense: A Study of Modern Warfare Applied to Extra-Terrestrial Invasion? I didn’t! I hope it doesn’t involve Will Smith as a fighter pilot and a computer virus that somehow infects completely alien computer systems… (Via Instapundit.)
Starship Troopers closer to reality:
Robotic powered exoskeletons for soldiers will be delivered to the U.S. Army for testing in 2008. What’s it like to wear one? Main tried it out himself recently. “It makes you feel really, really strong. You get the sensation that you have a lot of strength. I sort of felt like The Hulk and I’m …
Nanotech battle suits
In his 1959 novel Starship Troopers (the movie of the same name has almost nothing in common with the book–ignore it!), Robert Heinlein invented the idea of powered battle armor, which gave an infantryman more fighting power than a modern tank, protected him from battlefield hazards, allowed central command to locate him and monitor …
The Pentagon
In everyday usage, “The Pentagon” is shorthand for the U.S. military command, so we sometimes forget that it is an actual building. Last week’s terrorist attacks on the U.S. reminded us all too forcefully that it is, in fact, really just an office building–albeit one of the largest in the world, one in which 23,000 …
Radar
With the end of the Cold War, a lot of previously classified military technology is making its way into civilian hands. Spy satellites whose very existence was top secret, for instance, are now being used to survey crops. This post-war transfer of technology from military to civilian use is not new: it happened after the …
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