Impressive wall, 12-feet thick. I don't think the exterior walls of the Pentagon were nearly so thick. But it did demonstrate the total disintegration of the airframe, which is consistent with the result of Flight 77.
The video is the one that others have been posting, showing the plane coming in from the right, flying to the left. The image seems to occupy just one frame and is mostly a blur. The fuselage looks pretty skinny, but it is more recognizable if you consider that the upper third is contrast-invisible, being painted blue against a sky background, and the lower third being white, fading into shadow. What is left are the red, white, and blue livery stripes at the mid-line of the fuselage, which are better seen in the video. I recall being puzzled at the image initially. It seemed too slender. Then I realized that what was visible was the livery, with the rest of the fuselage being of similar brightness to the background---which is a phenomenon that results in invisibility at a distance, which was demonstrated by the Army Air Force in World War II (though too limited and impractical to implement operationally).
Who in the world said anything about being precise to within a few feet? Being within 10-20 feet at the start of a glide slope would be adequate. You have an exaggerated sense of what was adequate. Lining up on the target and aiming at the foundation footing was enough to get it there.
No time or patience or interest in flight simulators, but a friend once allowed me to fly his light Cessna on the straight and level. That part was not particularly hard, but I was quite disoriented by all the scenery I could see from the air that I was unaware of on the ground. It made landmark recognition difficult. (This would be less of a problem for something like the Pentagon, which was unmistakable and set apart from any confusing surface features.)
What is so humorous about clipping a streetlight? It only proves that the airplane was not flying at "zero" altitude (which would have been a belly slide all the way in). Let me remind you again that it doesn't take much skill to be unable to defeat the ground effect that was keeping the airplane buoyant.
You know, we have this conceit that the 9/11 air pirates were know-nothings and were miserably under-trained for what they were doing. But it just now occurs to me that perhaps they all came from a piloting background in their native lands, even ex-fighter pilots. Why would they take any training classes here? Maybe to learn our procedures, so as to do a better job when Showtime arrived? That would make events a bit more understandable.
Change the subject...an old maneuver. No thanks. I don't trade one empty conspiracy for another.
I worked where they build these airliners. The structures are tough, and you fail to substantiate your groundless claim that an aircraft fuselage is "relatively soft."
The video shows the plane colliding into the Pentagon. Recognizable by the American Airlines livery.
The rest of your nonsense presumes that all the actual evidence does not exist, which is denialism of the first order. You complain that the DoD has video footage that they are not showing---but this is all imaginary, in your head!
Another aspect of denialism is to claim the event was somehow impossible, notwithstanding that it happened. To a large extent, airplanes are designed for stable flight, which means they are intended to fly that way even when the pilots are hands-off. You are omitting the fact that the terrorists flew the plane from where it was when they commandeered it, to the Pentagon. Flying in a circle to lower altitude is not a surprising feat. And their final approach was a shallow dive, not "at zero feet" (presumably plowing the ground), though it looks like they were aiming at the foot of the building. They were at least 10-15 feet altitude at the start of the dive, when the wing clipped off the street light. Ground effect was working against early contact with the ground (and if you don't know what ground effect is, you have no knowledge of airplane aerodynamics).
And another thing. You must have no experience of high speeds. When you get lined up, and there are only seconds to go, not much is going to disturb you from your path. There won't be enough time.
And you have just proven you don't know what you are talking about. Go back to sleep.
Simple: (1) Multiple witnesses on the ground and in the air saw the airplane. (2) The airplane was tracked on radar from the departing airport to the Pentagon. (3) Video image was consistent with an American Airlines airliner. (4) Airplane wreckage was present. (5) Damage was consistent with an airplane crash. (6) Passengers were killed and destroyed, never to be seen again. This is all POSITIVE evidence for what happened.
There is NO positive evidence for a missile. (1) No missile was seen. Had a missile clipped the streetlight, it would have torn its wing off and gone out of control. (2) No radar signature of a missile. (3) No video image of a missile. It would have been too small to for the image that was taken. (4) No missile wreckage was found. (5) Damage excessive for a missile crash. No explosion, only a fire. (6) What happened to the passengers?
All you have is bullshit and bravado. You are trying to gaslight the whole scenario---ignore the witnesses, ignore the radar tracking, ignore the video image, ignore the wreckage, ignore the massive damage, and ignore the passenger deaths. Talk about denialism. The missile hypothesis stands on the same ground as an attack by a vampire bat: purely imaginary, no evidence.
Since you don't have any evidence or reason to think there was a missile, your belief must be in response to some psychological need. This is what is called a paranoid delusion, which is the leading edge of psychosis. It involves the complete abandonment of rational discourse, devolving into castigation and baseless insult. As a result, you fail to see how you appear in public: mental slobber.
No, the person writing the caption is a nitwit. For one thing, he (whoever he is) misspelled "past" as "passed." Evidence of English not being his native language? And for the crucial thing, the engineer spelled out explicitly that the Orion capsule was going to pass through the Van Allen belts twice, and that doing so requires shielding from the high energy particles. Since they did it before, many times with geostationary and Molniya satellites, and a number of times with human passengers on the Apollo missions, this is no surprise. I think you should have listened to the video before you jumped on the bandwagon.
So, the engineer said quite specifically that they were going to pass through the Van Allen belts with safety because they are doing their due diligence to make sure that the design works as intended. This is the OPPOSITE of the caption.
Nuclear powered aircraft carriers have nuclear reactors that exploit the process of nuclear fission, where uranium nuclei break into two fragment nuclei (of other elements) and neutrons, and release energy in the process. RTG's powered by plutonium are simply depending on plutonium's radioactivity, release of alpha particles and energy. Two completely different processes.
There is no reason why radio signals cannot pass through the Van Allen belts. The "impenetrability" applies only to electrons within the belts, not to radio signals or space probes. You ought to read your reference before posting its URL.
Well, the "missile strike" reference wouldn't open; my antivirus software flagged it as suspect.
Ever seen racing cars flip, tumble, and come apart? Engines can do that, too, and any excess energy can easily be diverted into self-destruction. (The internal aerodynamic forces within an engine want to pull it apart axially in tension.) Since when is an airplane fuselage "relatively soft"? Relative to what? A tank? These are pretty tough cookies, and the main deck is perhaps the strongest structure in the airplane, excepting maybe the wing beams. They both come together at the wing box, THE strongest structure of the airplane. The main deck would have high momentum density, since it would be like a knife blade penetrating the building.
But everyone SAW it was an airplane, including an airborne observer. You're like the guy who contends that someone was trampled by a dinosaur, when the crowd says, "He was trampled by a zebra. We saw it. It had stripes." And he had hoof prints on his body.
No, it was in a shallow dive. A wing clipped off the upper part of a street light pole (the kind that's about 20 feet tall). Ground effect undoubtedly played a part in prolonging the final phase, as the wing lift essentially doubles when the plane gets within about half a wingspan's height above the ground. (Ground effect prevented the first attempt of the U-2 to land on its first test flight. Very awkward and quite unanticipated. The pilot had to invent a way of reducing lift in order to touch down. They later had to add spoilers to the wings in order to dump the lift in order to touch down for a landing.)
The ground radar traced the flight path of that airplane from departure to pentagon impact. You are dreaming up things that are refuted by the facts.
I worked next to the factory that made the ALCM and was familiar with its size and shape from inert rounds that were stored in hallway locations in another building. Can you say as much? The body diameter was 24 inches, which is clearly in the ballpark of my remark---and smaller than the hole made by the 757 (which, again, was seen and identified as an airliner).
Look, you have no argument. You are sweeping aside all the positive evidence that it was exactly as described, which cannot be refuted.
More to the story. The tabletop lasers used in physics labs and so forth are about 3-5% efficient. They are typically under 10 milliwatts, so the power dissipation is not a problem. You are correct about the cause of the inefficiency, and why it is called quantum efficiency. The lasing atom or molecule is excited up to the top energy level for the laser transition, and then drops down to the lower level to releast a photon. But the lower level is not all the way to the bottom, so there needs to be thermalization to get down to the starting point in the cycle.
The Maui lasers are not designed as weapons. They don't do target testing up there, with the possible exception of testing for sensor kills on satellites, which would be much lower power levels than for terrestrial weapons. They are designed to shoot up, not down. And they better damn well not threaten air traffic. Also, there is no confirmation that there can be an unobstructed line of sight from the summit of Mt. Haleakala to wherever the fire was. You have to keep asking, "What is the EVIDENCE?" Not, "Why can't it be my favorite Cabal weapon?" You might as well ask "Why can't they be Leprechauns?"
We have some anti-air DEWs for surface units, mounted on trucks, presumably to be tested in a field environment (shooting UP at targets), and some on ships for testing in a maritime environment (again shooting at air targets, though maybe sea skimming). No DEWs for strategic defense.
The strategic anti-missile defenses are the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GBMD) system interceptors and radars. There is a silo field located in central Alaska to engage warheads arriving from over the north pole, and there is supposed to be another smaller field in Vandenberg AFB to engage warheads coming from the Pacific Ocean. No need to put them in Hawaii; the engagement geometry is bad (straight overhead). The Aleutians are a poor place to be---just rocks and volcanoes. Easier to be near Fairbanks. These locations are openly discussed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-Based_Midcourse_Defense
You want to punch up somebody you don't like. Do you hire out a walk-em, sock-em robot from Boston Dynamics, or hire a mean bouncer who throws a wicked left hook? Better yet, a handful of bouncers? Occam's Razor says "don't invent complicated answers if simple answers are adequate."
This is getting so predictable, it is almost sleep-inducing. No ability to refute => turn on the name-calling machine and fling.
Heck, if you wanted to be fancy, you could use napalm or thermite. Just a match and some gasoline would work wonders.
And my opinion is that it is not even worth having an opinion about. I live where massive forest fires are common enough that we had plenty before lasers were even invented.
I'm sorry, but I did research for a living. "Well researched" does not come up with the wrong answer. High effort means nothing if it is mistaken. In this case, the anon could have avoided the errors if he had simply become familiar with the construction of turbofan engines and what the components look like. There is no way that a worthy researcher would claim (in effect) that an inlet fan and a turbine disk were the same thing. That was the whole premise on which he hung his conclusion. We can't let sloppy research fuel empty conspiracy theories. It is a waste of time and a distraction from the truth.
I suspect it is the other way around. The truth is so...mundane. It is depressing to think that so much damage could so easily be accomplished by commonly used technology. It is all a matter of evil intent. They need the lies to amp up their adrenaline over the possibility of a PLOT to use advanced weaponry. Well, they used a modern airliner. What more advanced weapon did you want? (This was not a new idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aphrodite.)
I ran into this psychology many years ago in the context of a discussion over the potential for a nuclear weapon being somehow smuggled into the United States and detonated. I thought it was a fanciful idea and proposed a method to achieve the same result with conventional explosives and simple massed concentrations, to be set off remotely. No one would be the wiser. Nuclear technology was not necessary. But nobody worried about that possibility...and the whole prospect was unlikely for one simple reason: the inability to keep such a project secret. So, I realized that technology wasn't the issue. The only issue was operational...and the inherent lack of centralized control.
A missile would leave a hole about the size of a telephone pole. Far too small to account for the damage seen. The fuselage deck would be the structure that would penetrate, and it was 11.5 feet wide. Moreover, the airplane was WITNESSED to be an airplane by multiple witnesses, including one airborne witness. It's wing also clipped off a streetlight, which would have fatally crashed a missile. The photographed engine component is already larger in diameter than a cruise missile. The roof collapsed because a plane hit the building---you don't have roofs collapsing because an airplane DIDN'T hit the building.
What's wrong is that you don't know your way around a modern aircraft engine. The 7-foot-diameter applies to the FAN, which is at the front of the engine, and is entirely consistent with the photo of Trump's airplane. The last photo, of the wreckage, shows either the last stage of the COMPRESSOR or what is probably the first stage of the TURBINE, consistent with the Rolls-Royce diagram. (Blade heights are already small in these positions; nothing is broken off.) As "Pbman2" points out, the central button could be a shaft separation.
Pathetic. That's just a piece of flotsam. Impossible to confirm that it is a diver...who magically appeared out of nowhere, unseen by everyone all around, and killed her by heart failure. She was 65 years old. Show me the guarantee that Miss. Fuddy was going to live forever.
I have a bad bedside manner. I also have a thick hide. It just struck me as interesting...kind of an impeachment of the otherwise unimpeachable anon ethos, where confirmation bias is stronger than curiosity and truth-seeking.
But, to your questions. I gave one to "needmorecovfefe" elsewhere in this discussion. Maybe I can try to do more. Laser engineering is like any other engineering: you have to learn the basic principles before you can begin to understand the technology and phenomenology. Think what happens when something involves flight and people comment without knowing aerodynamics, propulsion, or aircraft structure. With lasers, the basic science is quantum mechanics.
Clouds are bad mainly because (1) they prevent the laser from seeing its target, and (2) they scatter the beam, and sometimes (3) if they are water, they absorb the beam. Even sea aerosols are bad, which is why maritime lasers are mounted at least deck high or on the superstructure to get above the seawater aerosols (droplets and salt particles). Refraction is something that can cause the target image (and beam path) to jitter over long distances. This is why low altitude applications are not usually promising, unless they are shooting upwards (air defense). Diffraction is a property of the beam and has to be dealt with by design or operation. In our weapon design work, we normally took it for granted that an airborne weapon would have to operate above the cloud deck (say 30,000 feet) shooting maybe co-altitude and upwards. Such weapons are so expensive and complicated, it hardly makes much sense to divert them to such trivial things as lighting fires. (Oh, it was talked about, but it wasn't worth much more attention than that.)
These weapons do not have an unlimited operational duration; either they have a finite supply of reactants, or of coolants. Current work is concentrating on electric lasers and internal cooling systems, but their power is well below the megawatt level. I will be interested to see how they propose to go to higher power levels without resorting to disposable coolants. We were originally working with the electric discharge carbon monoxide laser, emitting at about 4 microns wavelength. The quantum efficiency was about 40% or slightly better, the highest on record, and our designs had to use large quantities of liquid ethane as storable coolant to soak up the waste heat.
I keep on mentioning my Last Hurrah, the YAL-1A airborne laser, which successfully engaged and destroyed a boosting ballistic missile in 2010. If you read the Wikipedia article about it, you can pick up a lot, and get pointed to contributory topics.
Oh, and the fellow is not "talking shit" exactly, but he doesn't quite know what he is talking about. The weapons are studied and designed at AFRL at Kirtland AFB (or Space Force Base). Component technology and phenomenology against space targets are logically conducted at the Maui facility on top of Mt. Haleakala. Guidestar lasers are used to provide optical correction to telescopes, not as weapons. All the optics there are looking up, not down at forests.
It has always been transparent, excluding the specific classified components. You just have to look in the defense-related journals and publications. The history began in 1972. https://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/all.htm
So why is it that when the kicking is fatal to the idea, the proponents of the idea take it personally? As a hallmark of closed-minded conspiracy vendors, out to insert their interpretation into every shadow? You criticize the "cancel culture" and your reaction to me is "just Shut The Fuck Up"? Appreciation of irony is not your strong suit.
I have been respectful to persons, but not to ignorance. I think I am correct in stating that I am the only one on this board that has direct experience with the design and analysis of DEWs. I try to educate by providing information. I see that nobody can refute my information. All the reaction is against the fact that I speak from the authority of knowledge and experience. Maybe this shows up those who speak from superficial internet research, and don't like their trailing shirt-tails to be pointed out. So, tuck in your shirt-tails. Does anyone engage in the discussion by asking me for further explanation or information? I am happy to oblige, as I think I have demonstrated in the past.
You can't ask intelligent questions if you engage in a massive complex of mistaken assumptions. And if you have questions, you need to recognize the answers from the very people who deal with the subject matter (DEWs). The discussion on this board tends to take as a given that DEWs are used as instruments of the Cabal---rather than scrutinizing whether there is any specific evidence they are being used. Ambiguous "evidence" resting on ignorance of real effects or limitations is not worth arguing.
I read that the wing clip was observed. And the fate of the piece clipped is consistent with events. The airborne observer witnessed the ultimate crash.
Of course, Operation Northwoods never happened. The credibility of the scenario is only speculative. And there is no EVIDENCE that this was such an event.
I was referring to the main deck of the airplane which would have entered similarly to a knife blade. Aluminum is a lot more durable than human flesh, but a lot of structure was stripped off. Someone here (I can't recall if it was you) showed a video of a ground test propelling an F-4 fighter into a 12-foot-thick reinforced concrete wall at 200 mph. The entire airplane was obliterated into tiny pieces. Human beings are not so durable. They would have been pulverized.
Why are you trying so hard to become a mental pretzel? The facts are clear and obvious. Evil intent reeks from all this. Does it somehow offend your religion that the government is not necessarily a monolith and that it can and maybe often does tell the truth? People lie and also tell the truth. Even liars do not lie all the time; too much fictional baggage to carry around. What is important is to discern lies---by finding the truth. Not to discern truth by assuming lies. This is a pretty shitty way of respecting the dead---to declare that they never were real.