Category: Technology

Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator

Underground Atomic Explosion

A few weeks ago I was listening to the radio in my car, I forget what station it was but it might have been the local National Public Radio station, and I heard someone mention ‘REHP’ and that there was going to be funding for this new program. The announcer seemed kind of upset about this so I figured that I should look into it – anything that twists the shorts of the radio nuts should be worth reading about.
Turn out I was right, RNEP stands for ‘Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator’ ( I can see why they used ‘Earth’ and not ‘Ground’ – Who wants a bomb called a ‘RNGP’? The other nations would smirk and point their fingers at us while we were not looking.) If you ask me, ‘Nuclear Earth Penetrator’ sounds like a real good brand of gopher killer or a bad guy in a low budget Japanese horror porn movie. But I digress, the device is the latest in the anti terrorism bunker busting ordinance. The idea is that a thin very pointed bomb will be dropped from an aircraft and upon impacting the ground it is supposed to dig itself down like 30 feet and then detonate it’s atomic payload. Once that is done, the bunker (hidden 1000 feet below the surface) with the bad guys de jour will be destroyed and the flyboys can go back to the base and catch up on some missed beer time.
Well, that might be nice on paper but the million cubic feet of radioactive dirt that will be thrown up as a result of the nuclear explosion is going to cause some serious issues. You can’t just go around irradiating the country side like that and not expect to piss everyone off. Thankfully, it looks like congress is not going to be funding much research into this weapon. I guess even in this day of ‘there’s a terrorist under every rock’ cooler heads still prevail. Or not. The Air Force was just given $4 million (from the energy bill!) into non-nuclear bunker busting devices. Anyone want to bet that the warhead is the same size and mass as a nuclear one? Yeah, I’d say thats even money there. The future looks dark folks… Nuclear winter dark…

Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator
What’s a “bunker buster” nuke?
Background: The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator

RNEP, nuclear, weapon, war, busting

The Geobat

Geobat

Looks like a workable design, there are R/C flying models of it and they act pretty stable. The 1/4 scale (5.5 feet) craft is downright impressive, I would very much like to see the full scale version come to market. At the very least as a kit that an experimenter could build on their own. General aviation has taken a big hit in the last few decades due to the rising cost of aircrafts, maintenance, and insurance. Plus I think that many people just don’t get exposure to aviation like they once did. In my fathers day, due to pilots being trained for World War II, the general aviation field entered it’s golden era. My dad dusted crops in North Dakota from his Piper Cub and people were talking about every family owning their own flying car. Now days that is still a dream. I hope the Geobat makes it.
I could even see in the future a group of Geobats preforming acrobatics at air shows. Talk about a show stopper!

Good overall performance envelope combining outstanding Short Take Off and Landing (STOL) performance, (expecting less than 500 ft. ground run) reasonably high cruise speeds (180 – 220 mph depending on power installed and cruise altitude), with eyewatering aerobatic performance. Expect power-off stall speed to be at or below 55 mph with flaps down at nominal gross weight. Excellent forward visibility combined with transparent floor panels creating a helicopter-like cockpit environment. Unique leading edge design feature, transparent leading edges about the forward and rear wings are illuminated with lights (pick your color).

BTW, they have a store if you want to build your own! (Sorry, radio control only)

Flying Saucers – The Geobat

future, cool, aircraft, experimental, aviation

Sodarace – Man vs AI

Soda

Go see if you can build a… ‘thing’ that is faster than what the computer can come up with. Sometimes being able to add real fast gives you the upper hand. :/

Sodarace is the online olympics pitting human creativity against machine learning in a competition to design robots that race over 2D terrains using the Sodaconstructor virtual construction kit.

Sodarace

soda, Ai, race, game, construction

Optimus No Longer Prime

lcd keys

this looks like a more real world version of the Optimus keyboard. Too bad this version isn’t as amazingly cool looking as the other one, but it would be much easier to build. I figure that it’s a revision A kind of thing, the first versions all look like crap but get the job done. Once it takes off then it will start looking cooler.

The United Keys key-displays keyboard

computer, optimus, cool, keyboard

Craft ROBO

Craft ROBO

If a loved one asks for this $400US Japanese ink-jet printer/paper cutter, it might be a sign that they are serious about making paper craft toys. Or that they are nuts. Either way this printer is a bit like the small desktop vinyl sign cutters that you can buy these days – call up the design on its program, load in some paper, and out comes a full color pre-cut paper project. Very neat!
You can run cardstock through it ( “(157g/m 2) and drawing paper * and postcard * mount 0.3mm or less in thickness” from the web site) , thats good because most paper models you build need thicker stock or they look like crud. Looks to only be supported under Windows, no mention of Macintosh at all. Bummer.
I wonder if this printer will make full clean cuts or will it make tiny pinholes in the paper so you can punch it out. Looks like is should make clean cuts from what the specs say but a demo would be nice (someone want to fly me to Japan to check this out?) I’d also like to know what the smallest cut size is, I’ve built some paper models that have some very small parts in them. It could be quite small as I now see that there is a plastic backing film that is rolled on to the paper during the printing process. This must be to keep parts from sliding around and hitting the heads. I doubt that the price per page would be very low but it sure would be fun to use. If the Craft ROBO is too small for your hobby, then you might want to look at this one. The Craft ROBO Pro II (translated page here) takes roll paper and will print/cut sheets as large as 2mx42cm!
You know, some people learn Japanese for the culture, some to understand the Anime, and others to play import video games. I’d learn Japanese to use this printer, as long as I could either make my own designs or import designs and tell it where to cut the paper.

Craft ROBO
[Translated via Excite Japan]

[via BoingBoing]

papercraft, toys, paper, Japan