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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?

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rshow55 - 04:12pm Sep 25, 2002 EST (# 4534 of 17697)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Bats catch moths all the time. Even for trajectories that look very tricky.

That's because a bat can "guess" the future motions of both itself and the moth it is tracking (using a temporal ranging code), and makes "guesses" that get better and better - convergently - so that the bat catches the moth, rather than misses.

Though if a moth hears the bat, and evades, that moth sometimes escapes.

Moths that fly trajectories that the bat can follow become bat-dinner.

They are bat-dinner because the bat can predict flight paths with respect to itself, and "knows" how to adjust its own flight precisely - so that the curve of the target motion and the curve of the bat motion intersect.

To do this, the bat's "guessing" has to be very good - my own guess is so good that it has to be solving very good approximations of differential equations - in every way that matters for quantitative performance.

Something that the model airplanes can also do.

rshow55 - 04:19pm Sep 25, 2002 EST (# 4535 of 17697)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Now, for the first year or two (unless the engineering teams in schools are a little faster than I think they'd be) a "dogfighting" competition might require a "follower" to be MUCH more agile (capable of more accelleration, more speed) than the "target" plane.

The engineering teams would need to get good "transfer functions" on how throttle and flap changes change follower flight paths, and get the following logic straight - but they'd know that if they did that - they could "follow" the lead plane almost perfectly - there would be no "misses."

After a little while, that would get boring, I think. Every team would work out essentially perfect following - for followers much faster than the lead planes. That would be boring.

But the game could go on, and would stay interesting, if in successive years the difference between the "lead" planes and "follower" planes got less.

rshow55 - 05:37pm Sep 25, 2002 EST (# 4536 of 17697)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

As of now, we'd be quite close to stability - with military technology and human patterns in place -- if we didn't have bombing.

No one would question US dominance if there was no bombing (or if Americans understood bombing to carry the expenses and exposures that it carried for most of the 20th century.) But the idea that the United States could kill, at a distance, with complete impunity would be gone.

If that idea was gone - we'd be pretty close to the conditions a stable peace requires --- now.

lchic - 06:17pm Sep 25, 2002 EST (# 4537 of 17697)
ultimately TRUTH outs : TRUTH has to be morally forcing : build on TRUTH it's a strong foundation

" .... if Americans understood bombing to carry the expenses .... "

Were the concept of war made redundant, the UN declaring there to be NO SUCH THING

Exepting of course 'corrections' made by the UN to bring 'intolerable' situations to an accepted norm

A lot of international work would have to be done regarding models of leadership. Too many x-leaders/leaders have literally put their national treasurey billions into Swiss, and other international, bank accounts in their family name.

To have good leadership requires the implementation of standards. The development of trading blocks such as the EU is one method for incremental improvement.

The current situation where a country can -war- another without an international procedure needs upgrading.

The USA have war-ed their way through the twentieth century (rightly or wrongly) leaving the debris of war - that still kills - behind.

Looking at the current Iraq situation, where lots of folks are ALL FOR WAR - could the concept of war be personalised.

How about a tv channel public link-ups with families from the USA (who are all for war) with the families they are voting to obliterate.

Would the similarities of same age children, similar jobs, suburban or country lifestyles, ambitions for children, leisure activities and the like, that names are people, that people breath and dream .... wouldn't this bring home the point that there needs to be CIVIL reorganisation rather than blind warfare !?
Current technological links can enable this.

$200 billion dollars is one estimate of the cost of war with Iraq. (The clean-up will not be included - the US doesn't clean-up much post war).

Spending $200 billion

nb and money has to be GOT before it can be spent - the got bit can be hard earned

What outcomes would the USA public want to achieve as they to 'spend' $200 billion ....

Divide the number of USA-shareholders-of-USA-inc(entire population) into that figure - how much per head are they each spending? What are they getting in return? Projecting forward - do they 'like' what they see?

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