Paint an arrow on the floor so I can follow.
Weather modification is still a nutty supposition. The states recognize all kinds of woke nonsense, and a fear of weather modification is part of the crazy menu. They also thought that it was a good idea to institute highway speed limits at 55 mph, so it is very unjustified to use state legislatures as a litmus test for credibility. Patents are all talk and wishful thinking, until and unless somebody does something about them (yet to be established). I have nothing against patents; I have several. But none of them have been built as described.
DEWs are merely a public fact. Only the uninformed think otherwise. They have been in the aerospace press that long. Major developments have occurred (e.g., YAL-1A). But space-based lasers are still paper ideas only, with no indication of any reality. (Now, the Chinese have supposedly announced their intention to develop a space-based laser system, but it remains to be seen whether that is for technology testing, communication experiments, or weapon application.) Rationality must prevail---at least among us.
These Q allusions are not even references. They could mean almost anything. Nothing but confirmation bias to link them to space weapons.
The mountainside collapsed. Due to geologic weakening from repeated underground nuclear detonations, the last one having been 10x greater in yield than anything tested before. I mean, who could'a thunk it?
Still no evidence for "Rods from God." It is a system concept that doesn't make sense, which is why it was only a slide in a briefing package.
In my view, a large part of the problem is that those who take up the "space-based DEW" cudgel have no idea what they are talking about. They pick up uninformed or ill-informed internet buzz and run with it. Contrary to the anon ethic...they do not conduct any research. If they had, they would discover that the history of this technology is at least a half-century old. That various experimental units and devices were involved in test programs. That the largest DEW of all time had been developed, built, tested successfully, and scrapped...all before 10 years ago. They would have learned about the big interest in space-based DEWs during the SDI years of the 1980s---and the realization that such systems were too huge, too complex, too expensive, and too limited to bother with further. And time has marched on as the Air force continues its love affair with shorter wavelengths. Some of these ideas may arise again (though they will still run into the same limitations as before). I'm waiting to see.
But the only informed attitude is one of calm and understanding where we are, not hyperventilation and imagining DEWs under our beds or in orbit.
A patent is only the recognition of a bright idea as commercial intellectual property, protected by law. It nowhere guarantees actual implementation. It is like stock speculation.
I second the motion. When DEW development has been publicly presented for the past half century, successful anti-ballistic-missile engagements announced in 2010 (and thrown in the memory hole by Obama), and battlefield tactical DEWs are being deployed for operational testing over the past few years, it is ridiculous to allege they were ever "secret." But what would I know? I was only involved in their design.
I watched about 15 minutes of it (I don't have time to watch an hour of it) and it was authentically fascinating. But what it showed me was that this is some kind of widespread, commonplace phenomenon, as yet unexplained. I would be interested to hear what the professional firefighters would make of it.
I once watched the "Riviera" district of Santa Barbara burn to the ground in 1977 from an out-of-control brush fire. The city center is situated between two north-south running hills, and the Riviera was all across the western flank of the east hill. I viewed it from the opposing hill. It was---all I can say is "sobering." It put me in mind of Rome burning. Most of the 216 houses were ash afterward. I can't recall if there were any surviving trees. The fire did not start in a forested area and move into the city, so far as I remember.
In my neighborhood (down the street), a house was burnt to a total loss by an uncontrolled garage fire. The immediately adjacent houses (only feet away) were not touched. The house had to be razed and rebuilt.
The only thing I can think of to prompt investigation is the possibility that houses can create hotter fires, and that proliferation of fires from house to house may depend on fires being hot enough to have a significant component of thermal delivery from the heat radiation itself. That would bypass chemical effects and cook trees. I noticed in some of this fellow's photographs, the remains of basement walls. It crossed my mind that a basement could function like a woodstove, with the walls radiating heat back into the fire. (I have a cast iron stove insert, and the heat-ratiative environment within is a big part of how it works.) But I'm out of ideas. But this would be an indication that DEWs were not involved, because they would be certain to scorch any trees in the way of the beam. I will agree that something is "going on," but think it is a yet not-understood characteristic of fires in developed areas.
But there is plenty of proof I am an intelligent person. I brought you to admit that your original arguments were fantasy and that there was no complaint you could rationally make against my accusation that they were fantasy. I bet you didn't see that one coming. (I didn't. It was an amusing surprise, but not too incredible when it showed that you were all about lawfare maneuvering and had no overarching principle.)
And what else can you say of someone (me) who writes a competitive proposal to win a billion-dollar development contract for the largest weapon-class laser ever built by the Air Force? I don't think I qualify for the famous Ed Wood line of dialog: "Stupid, stupid, stupid." Did you get called into a year-long DARPA study contract to save it from having no plan of approach, and execute the contract to the approval and admiration of the government study manager? (I did.) The list goes on. The fact that you could care less about any reality doesn't bother me. You are, after all, only interested in fantasy.
Innocence is always the default position in absence of a proof of guilt. You know that. It is not subject to the proof test---since you cannot prove a negative ("he didn't do that").
But questions are not statements, and can not be true or false. And there would be no reason to offer a negative answer to either of them. Just because you have an animus toward me (and an inflated idea of your own brilliance) does not stand as evidence for any derogation.
They are talking mostly about airborne targets, particularly air-to-air. I don't think a tank will be much vulnerable, nor will they have a fire control system that can pick targets out of a cluttered background. Air targets will have a sky background, which will be relatively "cool" by contrast.
You don't understand topography, do you? There IS a clearing at the mountain top. That's where the buildings are located. Clearing or not, there is no clear line of sight to Lahaina, because there is an intervening system of mountain ridges on the west lobe of the island and Lahaina is at sea level. That's a line-of-sight drop of 10,000 feet. Eyeballing it, at the ridgelines of the West Maui Forest Reserve, any such beam would be only at 2500 feet altitude. Lahaina is protected by shadowing.
You can be involved in technology research without being a mad scientist and destroying the local population. You are still grasping at straws. And you don't really understand what would be evidence, i.e., physical events or residue that would be possible ONLY from the use of a DEW. Heat is not one of them, in the context of a forest fire, and combustion that can melt metal and glass.
Maybe not, but I don't much believe in that, either. And I certainly don't believe it could happen with a laser. It could be the fact that the fence post wood was more resistant to the fire environment than the more-highly-conductive metal. It is a commonplace that wooden timbers can have more resistance to a dwelling fire than steel structure. Quite surprising, but true.
There are a lot of people with experience of wildfires, and I don't see them coming out en masse as being amazed by this fire. The only people who seem to be obsessively bewildered are those who are not firefighters.
And the famous Battle of the First Punch!
The default in lieu of proof of a positive statement is to accept it as not true. This is exactly the standpoint of the assumption of innocence in a trial of an alleged crime. So, put up or shut up. But if you have a disclaimer that you have no idea of what the truth is, than taking your words to be fantasy would be true enough. At least now I've gotten you to admit that much.
And you cannot tell the difference between leading questions and debatable statements. How is the existence of a kill switch for vaxx different from the existence of Esperanto-speaking bats? No difference: no evidence. Are speaking bats possible? Are kill switches possible? No evidence, and no argument. Just fantasy. I guess I am happy at that outcome. You admit you are producing fantasy...and then complain when I denounce it as fantasy. The irony is rich.
You must be great at lawfare, since you are just trying to run in legalistic-semantic circles.
For all the talk of civil war, I think this would be the first battleground.
FOC? I don't speak Acronym very well. Too many meanings.
DEWs? Of course. I saw the target engagement films in the 1970s. I designed and analyzed them and their target effects. Tell me something I don't know.
Styropyro? If he exists, there is no need for space-based DEWs. Probably as dangerous to himself as to any target. He would be the best debunk of this whole nutty space-based idea. Right up there with flamethrowers, phosphorus, and other art of the trade.
For a matter of minutes only---if there are no clouds. (We generally ruled out any target below the tropopause altitude.) But there are no space-based DEWs. No evidence. And why would you use such an incredibly expensive device to commit arson, when kitchen matches and accomplices work just fine? It's like using a diamond drill to write things on sheets of platinum, when you could have easily used a pencil and paper. It does not pass the "Does this make sense?" test. You can't conclude magic was used if there was no distinctive evidence of it.
And that's why they don't. Once you find that the design is impracticable (can't be done, for technical, logistical, or financial reasons), you sigh and roll up the drawings and wait for time to change the circumstances or boundary conditions. Lasers are not magical contrivances; they require lots of heavy, expensive technology and plenty of power supply.
Do you really think that everything that has been designed has been built? There are various levels of design. And there are whole coffee table books about the advanced aircraft designed by the Third Reich which never were built. The U.S. has plenty of abandoned or down-selected designs that either were not built or only made it to the point of a mock-up or prototype.
It implies getting really close to something really fatal---enough to scare the shit out of you. I regard that as high risk. I would like to think that the concept of "close enough" is uppermost in their planning. Judging by the tenor of the public, I think the nation is getting antsy and the fence-sitters are jumping down off the fence.
Except nothing. The Maui facility, as I stated, conducts research in ground-to-space atmospheric viewing---which is part of directed energy weapon research. But nothing to do with weapon system testing. They are probably exploiting "guidestar" lasers to develop adaptive optical systems for space viewing. There is no test range, and the atmospheric conditions are only favorable at the altitude where the base is located. Propagation at sea level is less desirable. And you cannot shoot a laser beam through an intervening hill or mountain.
That is not the only thing that the Maui facility does, by the way. It has a very large mission in the subject of telescopic observations of satellites.
I'm not impressed with second-hand commentary about this from those who are not in the field. I was in the field. The system-level development and testing is and has been conducted by the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from the beginning. They have access to instrumented test ranges and they do take pot shots there. They have also done air-to-air beam experiments over decades. But nobody has been seriously interested in using lasers to promote arson. We have incendiary artillery for that job. A laser weapon is a valuable piece of equipment reserved for special purposes that only it can perform. (The weapons being developed are for anti-aircraft applications. They lock the beam on moving targets and point upwards. There's no way anything like this could depress and engage stationary land targets that are not military systems, and shooting from AMOS is a non-starter.)
If it was an infrared beam (which it would have to be, since that is the focus of all research in that area since the 1970s), neither you nor a camera would "see" any light from a scattered beam.
And if it were a weapon-class laser, the odds would be high that anyone who saw it directly or semi-directly would be blinded by the radiation. Zap yourself in the eye with a laser pointer and find out what 5 milliwatts looks like. Nothing to repeat.
That's exactly right. But what I am trying to highlight is that they have de facto appropriated "democracy" to mean rule by them, not "everyone has equal access to political power."
The same way I dismiss the existence of leprechauns: no evidence, and no rationale. The burden of evidence is on the one who makes the claim. If you don't understand that to be a basic principle of logic, you have something to learn. I am under no obligation to disprove a flight of fancy, when the flight of fancy has no substance behind it. If you think you are in a position to judge an impossible proof, you are not in that position.
The reason for this is that it is generally impossible to prove a negative ["there isn't x"]. It is only possible to prove a positive ["there is x"]. Otherwise there would be no limit of the claims to be disproved. Do bats speak Esperanto? Do elves operate internet gambling rings? Is there really someone in your closet?
The only work on Mt. Haleakala for laser weapons are studies of atmospheric propagation upwards. It is not a laser weapon test site. Do you think your pocket laser pointer is a weapon system?
I get the idea that no one here has bothered to see whether Lahaina is even viewable from the Air Force Maui Optical and Supercomputing (AMOS) site. It is at the peak of Mt. Haleakala, about 10,000 feet up on the east (larger) side of the island. Lahaina is on the east coast of the island (sea level)---tucked behind the mountainous hills of the West Maui Forest Reserve. There is no clear basis for thinking that a line-of-sight weapon could even target Lahaina, since Lahaina would have a LOS depression angle greater than the hillcrests of the Reserve.
It always helps to do the research, anons.
Not on this issue.
Only to the uninformed who believe what MUST be true, and get their technical knowledge from science fiction movies, if not from their imagination.