“Unfortunately, greens don’t do real economics – only the pretend economics of “sustainability” – so this global problem is unlikely to go away any time soon.”
It's amazing that we, or at least Israelis, can shoot down missiles. At all.
Israel is now facing the basic Game Theory problem, in that they are using an expensive sophisticated system to shoot down cheap crude ones. They are making the human decision to save lives, even if it costs money.
The Iranians, ( who aren't stupid ) no doubt told the Terrorist groups they supply, that the trick is to just fire off dozens, hundreds, of the cheap inaccurate missiles to make the Israelis use up all their expensive ones. That's a winning strategy against Democrats. Not Israelis. As a tactic, though, it's effective. It's a win for Iran, who gets the terrorist groups more in debt each day, ( and you know that's desirable, if your are a Mullah running Iran ) and makes the Israelis waste money on saving lives.
But, The Israelis aren't fools. They've already made it clear they aren't going to tolerate Iran setting up shop next door. Unlike the American Press they know that chant's of "Death to X" actually mean exactly that. SO expect more, and deeper strikes on Iranian forces in Syria, and soon, Iran itself.
Not a prediction, but speculation... If Israel moved a submarine into Iranian waters, a VERY long way away, except through the Suez Canal, ( Egypt would never help Israel sneak through the canal... or at least never admit it ) and started to sink Iranian submarines and/or slip commandos ashore to sabotage Iranian anti-ship missiles, the dollar cost per Hamas missile war against Israel the Mullahs are fighting today might be very different.
Heck, a unguided, cheap, artillery missile barrage from a sub off the coast of Iran on their Oil depot that fills tankers to go to China.... would hammer the economy of Iran.
As I read it, the "big thing" about iron dome was to determine if it "needed" to shoot a target or not. No sense in shooting a rocket at a target headed for the desert.
And completely automated. No time for a human to decide at those close ranges.
I normally comment when the subject comes up of robot killing machines, autonomous drones, etc. "Tell me, which movie was it that building the unstoppable killing machine was a good idea?"
But anti missile defense, Iron Dome or the systems now in production for shooting RPG & antitank missiles with a shaped "shotgun" charge, just before impact, HAVE to be automated to work.
I would need fresh pants after one of those saved my life, but I also would if it didn't, and wouldn't then care.
The first mention of this type of system I recall was in science fiction. David Drake's "Hammer's Slammers" series. Drake was in the only independent armored unit in Vietnam. His stories of that time can be chilling. Like riding a flamethrower tank in a thunderstorm. On top. Drake was a translator, and read old Roman histories in the original Latin, for stress relief, when off duty, after interrogations of dying enemy soldiers, or dying young women after an ambush, for example. Yeah, he had PTSD.
So, when he decided to write military fiction, he considered what was wrong with Tanks of the era, and "fixed" them for future combat. Hover tanks, no treads to break. Fusion power plants to lift & propel multi ton monsters. Speed. A.I. 360 degree vision systems, and... automated anti missile defense, much like you see above. But. In Drakes books, the band of replaceable shaped charge units that fired a sleet of tungsten cylinders, could be manually activated for close in anti personnel mode. Guy runs out of house with a satchel charge, too close to hit with your turret mounted "machine gun"? Stroke the touch screen and thumb a button on a joystick. Boom! no more bad guy. House is pretty messed up too. Harsh, but practical.
I bet that function is available on the Trophy and other systems, and I Do NOT expect that to be in advertisements sent out for public consumption. I bet there is a chapter in the manual, and the troops are told to keep it quiet. After all, the best surprise is one they don't expect.
Every year, I hear people complain about the heat in summer, and the cold in winter. Every year I think, and often say, that folk should enjoy the warmth while it lasts. I often mock them..... And I'm guilty of complaining too.
It's been a hot week for camping.
But I still remember a whole month under Zero. Working outside, you notice.
If the onrushing Cold Times arrive soon, you so won't like it. Neither will I.
For decades, forest management experts have told California bureaucrats that the policies forbidding clearing brush and collecting fire wood, to keep California "natural", will cause more and worse wild fires.
For decades, everyone who has a room temperature IQ should know that building homes in the forest & brush lands means more property damage if the brush & trees are close to houses in Fire Country.
For thousands of years, natives knew they lived in Fire Country, and practiced intelligent forest management, until stupid White Bureaucrats with ignorant hippie notions of "natural" turned Fire Country into Uncontrollable Firestorm Unprecedented Why Oh Why Is This Happening Land.
I feel sympathy for the victims of institutional idiocy.
It's not like the Santa Anna Winds never happened before. When the first humans walked there some arguable number of thousands of years ago, there were deserts inland, hills, and an Ocean to pump periodic hot, dry, air, at high velocities, through a vast region.
The cycle of "OMG, there are fires like clockwork, why didn't we know?" combined with "My degree in political science makes me an expert in regulating everything." however, is getting really old.
The subject of fire fighting aviation alone is enough to make you want to napalm the Capitols, and not just D.C. & Sacramento. Private companies that used WW2 & Cold War bombers to fight fires up & down the West coast were regulated out of existence, and replaced with promises of imaginary military equipment and non existent budgets flown by people that already retired.
Fire bombing is as specialized and dangerous a job as tank busting the Soviet Army invading Europe. The experts in the U.S. & Canada were/are highly motivated and trained in a brutally Darwinian arena. Because their invasion happens Every Year.
Politicians have screwed that up, badly.
Yes, the planes were dangerously old, and needed to be replaced by modern, improved equipment, but there is little budget for imaginary aircraft in a land whose politician's priorities is micro managing people and imprisoning providers of plastic straws.
Btw. The dream that "The National Guard will just use their C-130s and imaginary water bombing conversion kits" ran into the wall of the cold hard facts that every overworked and under budgeted plane in the inventory is booked months & years in advance, because under Clinton and Obama budgets for the military were cut.
So, California, you are on fire because your bureaucrats are power mad cretins, and America's Taqiyya President didn't think America should have a military to oppose his good friend Vladimir, or his spiritual brothers in Iran & The Muslim Brotherhood.
Next week, Why Trump caused the Earthquake, by withdrawing from the Paris agreement no one else ever intended to follow.
( where is the emoji for "I wish this was sarcasm? )
I have sympathy for the useful idiots there, but man...just let it burn itself out, clear itself, then enforce some land management that KEEPS it fire-safe.
Navigation radar interference, infrasound damage to people, flight hazard to low level flying.
How many people must die to be a recognized problem? One life?
I read the reports of blinding flashes from solar furnace farms. Safety hazard in the sky. For most people, a never seen thing, but for pilots in a hundred plus mile radius, a real problem that blocks collision avoidance vision. Will a 737 collide with a Piper Arrow because of mirror flash? Time will tell.
As a charter member of the Low & Slow aviation community, I've been too intimate with military training flights locally. But so far, for 40+ years, we've had zero collisions between the smallest & the fastest..... But a B-52 storming down a valley on a training flight lays a pair of horizontal tornadoes the size of towns, that snap full grown pines like match sticks. I don't need to imagine flying a Cub speed aircraft through that. And I doubt your imagination is brutal enough.
But now those valleys have windmills, and more to come. Studies & videos of "mixing of layers" changing local weather show multiple cubic miles of micrometeorological chaos downstream of wind farms.
Invisible death traps for General Aviation airplanes are increasing in size, distribution, and cost to the taxpayer. Each cluster of Green Blenders leaves an expanding 3D wedge of massive turbulence for miles behind it, and life altering ultrasound around it.
I find it ironic that it's probable that the VA be the lead in dealing with a health problem that will be denied as un-PC for civilians.
Even more ironic that the Green Lobby is vehemently denying the existence of infrasound health risks after complaining about power lines.
Invisible death traps for General Aviation airplanes are increasing in size, distribution, and cost to the taxpayer. Each cluster of Green Blenders leaves an expanding 3D wedge of massive turbulence for miles behind it, and life altering ultrasound around it.
Interesting. It is a fact that the spacing between windmills is far more than needed to allow for the turning blades to not hit each other. They are in fact spaced far apart like that because the turbulence they generate will destroy the gearboxes in the downwind windmills. No doubt this turbulence would be disastrous for aircraft. The speed at the blade tips are deceptively fast. I would love to see what smoke would do going into a field of wind turbines, like if you were testing in a wind tunnel.
The scale of everything on these machines is hard to grasp. As an example, they use a disk brake set up to stop and lock them. The brake caliper is so large it requires a crane to lift it off it's mounts.
Has anybody studied the effect of taking a couple of terawatts of energy from the environment?
No.
Frankly I doubt that you could get funding for that study.
The existing, and any soon systems will just affect local weather, and in subtle ways. It would be a real freak out if the wind farms now built are actually responsible for the severity of recent wild fires. ( I really doubt that, myself )
But the whole energy need of the U.S., taken out of the winds? That is a different order of magnitude.
Sifo, the people that fly near the windmills just give them a large, huge, HUUUGE, space. At low wind speeds, suitable for really small airplanes, there have been no reported problems. Of course, anyone with problems is probably flying too close to want to report it to the FAA.
I admit I have had a whim to go slaloming between the giants on a no wind day, just for giggles, but luckily for me I am a coward, and not really silly enough to do so. There is that issue with the FAA hunting me down and grounding me.
I've also resisted flying under bridges ( The Blue Max ) or between skyscrapers ( Fly Away Home ) but have run a few box canyons at speed. ( Star Wars Ep.IV )
"I've also resisted flying under bridges ( The Blue Max ) or between skyscrapers ( Fly Away Home ) but have run a few box canyons at speed. ( Star Wars Ep.IV ) "
One thing that is never mentioned is that our sun is in the middle of its main sequence. From here on out it'll continually get hotter until in roughly one billion years everything gets cooked.
How you gonna combat that, "climate change" people?
The scale of everything on these machines is hard to grasp. As an example, they use a disk brake set up to stop and lock them. The brake caliper is so large it requires a crane to lift it off it's mounts.
Actually, that's a holding brake. To stop them, they use an eddy current brake and dump the energy into a resistor bank to slow them down. Nothing like scorched brake pads and a runaway windmill to excite your day.
How you gonna combat that, "climate change" people?
I know how. It won't get approval from the Greenies.
Solar power satellites, a Lunar base, to make power sats & mirror sats, and a heavy industrial presence in cis-Lunar space.
I'd let the next gen of entrepreneurs build a L-5 station. I'm thinking bigger.
We may never reach Dyson Sphere level technology, but I think we are capable of a full Kardashev Type 1 Civilization, or close enough for our purposes.
Asteroid mining, Interstellar probes, power sats, are all possible with existing technology. We just have to build the infrastructure.
Rudimentary Weather control is going to take an order of Magnitude better understanding of the planetary environment. We have the tech to change the weather, to alter the insolation, but it would be suicidal to do so before we know what we are actually doing.
I certainly hope we have that level of understanding in the next few million years, before it becomes critical.
By that time we should have limited interstellar travel and all the eggs won't be in one basket.
Or we'll all be dead.
There's a list. The Sun burning us up is a sure thing, if the species lasts that long. There is a Discovery Channel Week of Sure Thing Dooms. And a Month of "likely if we aren't smarter" Dooms.