New York Times on the Web Forums Science

Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

mazza9 - 01:47pm Feb 3, 2002 EST (#11208 of 11259)
Louis Mazza

RShow55:

When the Clinton administration took office in 1993, there were just two OPIC investment funds, capitalized at $100 million. By the end of Clinton’s first term, 22 new funds valued at $3.1 billion had been created. Many are sponsored or managed by major Democratic Party fund-raisers or contributors and others with strong political ties.

BTW the large power project in India pursued by Enron was a 1995 collaboration between Clinton, Ron Brown, and various other Clinton criminals. I say make the the investigation non partisan and put all of the perps in jail.

and BTW none of this has anything to do with Missile Defense. If there is a political forum on sleazy maybe you should focus your efforts there.

Reminder MD WILL work.

LouMazza

rshow55 - 01:49pm Feb 3, 2002 EST (#11209 of 11259)

The End of NATO? by THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Were these reactions anticipated?

Could it be that other countries have better judgement about the threats from N. Korea, Iran, or Iraq ? They certainly have different judgements.

If the objective of missile defense was elimination of threats to the United States from missiles, that might be done pretty directly.

Is that the objective?

Or is the objective the spending of 200 + billion dollars ?

The technical case for missile defense seems as deceptive as the "profits" at Enron - - you have to distort a lot, and apply some very strange weights, and conceal a lot, to make BMD seem feasible, in the face of reasonable questions.

For example, gisterme DID give a response to a question I asked for:

"For example, just yesterday, you got me numbers, or rough numbers, about the power of the ABL COIL laser, which is a fine technical achievement. I guessed, from what I knew, at a power output of 2 megawatts -- and from there calculated power absorbed for 0% reflectivity, 98% reflectivity, and 99.8% reflectivity - - right at the source. The values were very low. Tiny. Assuming reasonable values of dispersion with distance, much lower still. If my guess of 2 megawatts output is off by a factor, these values are off by the same factor. That could be checked.

Yes indeed, gisterme gave a response. It was an interesting, intentionally deceptive answer, and everybody involved has to know it.

mazza9 - 02:11pm Feb 3, 2002 EST (#11210 of 11259)
Louis Mazza

RShow55:

You call Gisterme a liar.

"intentionally deceptive" was your choice of words.

You should not make such outrageous statements without proof. It's time for you to put up or ...."

LouMazza

rshow55 - 02:36pm Feb 3, 2002 EST (#11211 of 11259)

It would take me a long while, just to find all the examples of deception on your part, and gisterme's part, on this thread.

Intentional deception? Sure has looked that way to me, a lot of times.

Could it be that we're moving toward closure?

mazza9 - 03:07pm Feb 3, 2002 EST (#11212 of 11259)
Louis Mazza

RShow55:

Take the Time. Put Up or Shut UP!

And that goes for your little buddy lchic!

LouMazza

gisterme - 03:33pm Feb 3, 2002 EST (#11213 of 11259)

Lchic...loved your poem about the lady vacuumed to the jet! :-)

rshow55 - 04:02pm Feb 3, 2002 EST (#11214 of 11259)

Nice to see you around, gisterme . I've opined that your statements in 11199 gisterme 2/3/02 12:36am were misleading.

I'm looking at what's been done in the open literature, and reviewing some things, and it will take me a while to set things out.

One thing to note is the angular resolution involved, compared to space telescope , which may not be the best possible optical system, but which is an impressive one. That one never quite met specs (I could be wrong here) but the initial specs, which I get from Chaisson's book, involve a resolution of .5 microradian -- or .1 arc second - which would put about 70% of the light from a star (an optical point) within the .5 micro-radian band. We're talking about more resolution than that, in a number of ways.

While I'm working - - I do have a question - - not that you have to answer it. That is -- what does the adaptive optics adapt to -- to compensate for atmospheric dispersion, and focus on a moving target (which must be tracked) in the time allotted. How well does the system "see" the target, in the first place, in order to adapt its optics to it? And how many cycles for "adaptive control" -- how many "adaptive controls" -- and how are the adaptations done in a sequence (they aren't done all at once. Somehow, these adaptations require feedback loops and the feedback has to be accurate enough to do the adapting.

The question is "adaptive of what, with respect to what?"

Any detail you can supply would be appreciated -- without those details, I'll make estimates, and try to be clear about them.

The numbers I'm looking at make your suggestions of "convergence on a 10 cm circle at 100 miles" seem VERY far fetched -- and your suggestion of 50% dispersion over 100 miles is something I've not looked at --- and there are other questions, too, but I can't even get clear about "adaptive with respect to what? "

Also -- do you have a number on what you think burn-through takes -- a number that's been used is 1 kw/cm2 for five seconds - - but is that a good number?

You didn't really mean that ABL could focus to a target "the size of my fingernail" did you? Call that 1 cm circle, with 70% of the light focused on it _ and the same circle, for a moving target, seen only for a short time?

Lots of things to check.

(45 following messages)

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense