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Atomic Robo methinks?

Gauss Weapons? Yes please!

op source wrote:“We never got tired of the lightning bolts zapping our simulated (targets),” George Fischer, the lead scientist on the project, told Army.mil.

For once science and the masses agree.

The key thing about this is the target

But... what is it good at?

Killing Tanyas before they use C4 on your powerplants.

Kovnik Obama wrote:But... what is it good at?

Making friends, obviously.

KingCracker wrote:So we are the Ancient Necrons instead of the Imperium after all. Sweet.

Oldcrons please, We want the C'tan on our side. And Oldcrons were always better.

Pff tell that to the current Necron players

The new rules are better, but I really did prefer the old fluff. For the most part.

The money would be better spent on NASA...

GalacticDefender wrote:The money would be better spent on NASA...

This is true. We need battle cruisers with which to mount this on.

Surtur wrote:

GalacticDefender wrote:The money would be better spent on NASA...

This is true. We need A giant as Space-faring Night/Doom Scythe with which to mount this on.

Now this is correct!

GalacticDefender wrote:The money would be better spent on NASA...

Psh, this is something NASA should be working on!

Manchu wrote:If we have weapons that uses the power of a city ... then presumably we have a more affordable way to power cities?

I think he's talking about a small amount of energy fired into a small space at high speed, which produces a stronger explosion? Not sure. It surely isn't that simple though, as if the beam actually needed that much energy to fire, what the hell is powering it? Willing to be this is a case where some scientist explained some complicated explanation to some reporters but without a Star Trek suitable analogy to make the layman understand what the crap he's talking about XD

Its a matter of sustained output versus instantaneous output, most likely the device uses some form of capacitor.

Dreadwinter wrote:Gauss Weapons? Yes please!

That would be cool, but Gauss weapons are about magnetic fields.

Gauss weapons are just rail guns that use rings instead of rails, but a lot of scifi uses these terms interchangeably.

LordofHats wrote:

Manchu wrote:If we have weapons that uses the power of a city ... then presumably we have a more affordable way to power cities?

I think he's talking about a small amount of energy fired into a small space at high speed, which produces a stronger explosion? Not sure. It surely isn't that simple though, as if the beam actually needed that much energy to fire, what the hell is powering it? Willing to be this is a case where some scientist explained some complicated explanation to some reporters but without a Star Trek suitable analogy to make the layman understand what the crap he's talking about XD

Again, they're emptying capacitors extremely quickly. You can get the same wattage with a nine volt battery, assuming you could get the energy out of it quickly enough.

It's fairly simple. They use a laser to make an ionized channel in the air. They then empty a capacitor along said channel, creating an artificial lightning bolt. The bolt lasts for a tiny fraction of a second, yet carries all the energy from said capacitor. So, if the capacitor had fifty joules of energy stored in it, and it takes .0001 seconds for the capacitor to empty through the channel, the lightning bolt can be said to have a power equal to 500,000 watts (joules per second). There's still only a net force of 50 joules acting on whatever the bolt hit, so it's not going to be any more harmful than someone throwing a pencil at you.

To actually do the math, if the beam lasts for two trillionths of a second (.000000000001 seconds), and has a power of 50 billion watts (50,000,000,000), then the actual energy released is equal to .05 joules.

Hhhmmmmm so that amount of energy that is expended in that amount of time....if I remember correctly that was one of the problems the gause experiment was having...

I could never operate this weapon, id just yell "Beware i'm the god of lightning!" the whole time.

could never operate this weapon, id just yell "Beware i'm the god of lightning!" the whole time.

you lie....you won't release the trigger is the problem

Jihadin wrote:Hhhmmmmm so that amount of energy that is expended in that amount of time....if I remember correctly that was one of the problems the gause experiment was having...

If you're talking about the railgun the Navy was screwing around with, the problem wasn't that: It was keeping the rails from fusing together after a single shot. Apparently they've had some success with fixing this, as the latest test wasn't heralded with news of the thing exploding.

Jihadin wrote:

could never operate this weapon, id just yell "Beware i'm the god of lightning!" the whole time.

you lie....you won't release the trigger is the problem

You caught me... :(

Kovnik Obama wrote:But... what is it good at?

This.




Still way better than Vortex weaponry.

So hang on. When the US spends loads of money on an impractical Tesla weapon that needs absurd amounts of power to work, it's awesome, but when a Japanese politician mentions possibly spending loads of money on an impractical bipedal vehicle, it's a ridicule magnet?

Seems legit.

Don't worry Squiq. Soon, very soon, America will crumble under your soul crushing posts.

Squigsquasher wrote:So hang on. When the US spends loads of money on an impractical Tesla weapon that needs absurd amounts of power to work, it's awesome, but when a Japanese politician mentions possibly spending loads of money on an impractical bipedal vehicle, it's a ridicule magnet?

Seems legit.

Yeah, but gundams aren't named after the greatest geek who ever lived are they?
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla

Squigsquasher wrote:So hang on. When the US spends loads of money on an impractical Tesla weapon that needs absurd amounts of power to work, it's awesome, but when a Japanese politician mentions possibly spending loads of money on an impractical bipedal vehicle, it's a ridicule magnet?

Seems legit.

I fail to see how a weapon that can actually do something, is just as bad as a gundam, that would not only be blown apart by some pencil pusher 1000miles away with a laptop, but would probably fall over if it fired its weapons

Yeah, I wasn't suggesting that the Gundam idea was a good one (although in fairness I doubt they were thinking of an actual Gundam) but the amount of energy needed for the Tesla weapon to work is just too high.