|
Welcome to the International Skeptics Forum, where we discuss skepticism, critical thinking, the paranormal and science in a friendly but lively way. You are currently viewing the forum as a guest, which means you are missing out on discussing matters that are of interest to you. Please consider registering so you can gain full use of the forum features and interact with other Members. Registration is simple, fast and free! Click here to register today. |
8th November 2006, 06:55 PM | #361 |
Graduate Poster
Join Date: Apr 2005
Posts: 1,293
|
No kidding. But just imagine if Erik Beckjord were to get ahold of TS's photos. So many Bigfoots, so little time.
http://www.beckjord.com/bigfoottribephotos/ |
__________________
One can't break the laws of physics, but you can be civilly disobedient towards them. - Dr. Tiki And yea, the Lord did text unto the Philistines... U guys have to stop s1nnig. I totaly <3 U guys 4ever but I will pwn U when I CUL8ER and U will be all OMG! and WTF! and I be LOL!!! - Psiload |
|
8th November 2006, 06:58 PM | #362 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Sep 2006
Posts: 21,050
|
Errr... I think I lost track of PooperScooper321's claims. The towers were both nuked with a hydrogen bomb, causing pyroclastic clouds, and destroyed by the Star Wars beam of obliterating destruction, pulverizing the towers, and after that, the Star Wars beam of obliterating destruction punched some holes in WTC 5 and 6? And the latter was done because of...?
|
8th November 2006, 07:15 PM | #363 |
NWO Master Conspirator
Join Date: Mar 2003
Posts: 59,856
|
|
__________________
Vive la liberté! |
|
8th November 2006, 07:26 PM | #364 |
NWO Kitty Wrangler
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 29,690
|
|
__________________
Obviously, that means cats are indeed evil and that ownership or display of a feline is an overt declaration of one's affiliation with dark forces. - Cl1mh4224rd |
|
8th November 2006, 07:29 PM | #365 |
NWO Kitty Wrangler
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 29,690
|
|
__________________
Obviously, that means cats are indeed evil and that ownership or display of a feline is an overt declaration of one's affiliation with dark forces. - Cl1mh4224rd |
|
8th November 2006, 07:29 PM | #366 |
Muse
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 586
|
|
8th November 2006, 07:33 PM | #367 |
NWO Kitty Wrangler
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 29,690
|
|
__________________
Obviously, that means cats are indeed evil and that ownership or display of a feline is an overt declaration of one's affiliation with dark forces. - Cl1mh4224rd |
|
8th November 2006, 07:41 PM | #368 |
Muse
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 586
|
I'm not sure, but I just made a big discovery.
Applying Erik Beckjord's advanced image processing algorhythms to this photo, we can reveal some startling secrets. |
8th November 2006, 07:45 PM | #369 |
Scholar
Join Date: Sep 2006
Posts: 103
|
TS's enormous GIFs (not to be confused with TS's enormous guff) made me wonder: could it be some kind of laser machine gun? In space? The "blasts" seem to cover a wide area and in video games the machine gun is always the least accurate weapon, which is basically concrete proof.
So: a laser machine gun, fired from space, blasted enormous holes straight through the Twin Twers, causing their collapse. I have to say, back on 9/11/01 I never imagined I would be reading something like that. |
__________________
"The numerical value of the very first two letters in Killtown are 11/9" - Momoka on numerology "I'm down with critical thinking and debate, but there is a time and a place, and it's not here" - Beached, referring to the Loose Change forum. |
|
8th November 2006, 07:55 PM | #370 |
Illuminator
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: Dallas, TX
Posts: 4,785
|
I see the silhouette of a man's torso, with his arms in front of him (to the left in the photo) and a baseball bat over his shoulder. It looks like the MLB logo. OMG - this is all coming together now. In a Simpsons episode, I saw that MLB was spying on everyone from - wait for it - satellites! I bet they had energy beam weapons!
|
8th November 2006, 08:11 PM | #371 |
Fiend God
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: In a post-fact world
Posts: 96,875
|
|
8th November 2006, 11:52 PM | #372 |
Philosopher
Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 5,865
|
|
__________________
"Nature abhors a moron." -- H. L. Mencken |
|
9th November 2006, 02:09 AM | #373 |
Thinker
Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 173
|
Originally Posted by Housefly
Originally Posted by Horatius
When overlaying it, I had to distort it, to make it fit a bit better. The ammount of distortion used was about 5%. |
9th November 2006, 05:21 AM | #374 |
NWO Kitty Wrangler
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 29,690
|
|
__________________
Obviously, that means cats are indeed evil and that ownership or display of a feline is an overt declaration of one's affiliation with dark forces. - Cl1mh4224rd |
|
9th November 2006, 07:20 AM | #375 |
Muse
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 702
|
|
9th November 2006, 07:55 AM | #376 |
Thinker
Join Date: Jul 2005
Posts: 220
|
|
9th November 2006, 09:25 AM | #377 |
Graduate Poster
Join Date: Nov 2003
Posts: 1,532
|
|
__________________
Sometimes going by "Nyke" | "Pascal's Wager: Believe in Unicorns, or one might kick you in the nads!" | "There is no hope for humanity. Reason is dead and we dance on the corpse. Tra la la la la!" --c4ts | Intelligent Design & Expelled Exposed | I'm on dial-up. If you want to reply to me, summarize please. |
|
9th November 2006, 09:27 AM | #378 |
Thinker
Join Date: Jul 2005
Posts: 220
|
|
9th November 2006, 12:41 PM | #379 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Apr 2002
Posts: 11,286
|
|
9th November 2006, 03:47 PM | #380 |
NWO Kitty Wrangler
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 29,690
|
Well, it looks like TS1234 hasn't posted in this thread since last night.
Dare I hope we finally convinced him that at least one of his pet theories is wrong? Dare I hope he would admit it if we had? Anyone want to place bets? |
__________________
Obviously, that means cats are indeed evil and that ownership or display of a feline is an overt declaration of one's affiliation with dark forces. - Cl1mh4224rd |
|
9th November 2006, 04:17 PM | #381 |
NWO Master Conspirator
Join Date: Mar 2003
Posts: 59,856
|
|
__________________
Vive la liberté! |
|
9th November 2006, 04:51 PM | #382 |
Graduate Poster
Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 1,488
|
|
9th November 2006, 04:52 PM | #383 |
Graduate Poster
Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 1,488
|
hahaha this whole thread is comic genius. Star wars beam weapons. hahaha!!
|
9th November 2006, 04:58 PM | #384 |
Banned
Join Date: Sep 2006
Posts: 1,756
|
We've made progress on this thread as well. We've gone from denying that there are many round holes of similar diameter, to admitting it and seeking explanations. This is good.
Thank you for the beam diagram of WTC5. Those would be very useful for all of the WTC buildings. |
9th November 2006, 05:10 PM | #385 |
NWO Kitty Wrangler
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 29,690
|
"We"?
|
__________________
Obviously, that means cats are indeed evil and that ownership or display of a feline is an overt declaration of one's affiliation with dark forces. - Cl1mh4224rd |
|
10th November 2006, 02:08 AM | #386 |
Thinker
Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 173
|
|
10th November 2006, 04:02 AM | #387 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Apr 2005
Posts: 12,374
|
Dude. Nobody is 'seeking explanations' for this fantasy. If you hadn't noticed, they are ridiculing your theory because it is full of crap, and demonstrably so. You know, having a little fun at your expense.
I know, it's not nice, but sometimes when the theories are REALLY out there it's hard not to. |
10th November 2006, 04:16 AM | #388 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Aug 2002
Posts: 24,894
|
|
__________________
Experience is an excellent teacher, but she sends large bills. |
|
10th November 2006, 04:21 AM | #389 |
Guest
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 3,843
|
|
10th November 2006, 05:48 AM | #390 |
Fiend God
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: In a post-fact world
Posts: 96,875
|
|
10th November 2006, 08:53 AM | #391 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Apr 2002
Posts: 11,286
|
|
10th November 2006, 09:08 AM | #392 |
Unimpressed Female
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: 8th level of Hell - Maleborgia
Posts: 3,267
|
|
__________________
If anyone told you that I'm a nice person, they were either from a different level of existance, lying through their teeth or mentally instable. "We? That better be you and that invisible aardwarck in your pocket you are talking about, because I KNOW you are not stupid enough to open a giant can of whoop ass by claiming you know what I think." Stop Sylvia Browne |
|
10th November 2006, 12:25 PM | #393 |
Philosopher
Join Date: Apr 2006
Posts: 7,854
|
More Fun With Beam Weapons
A mathematician will be quick to point out that any arbitrary surface can be described by a collection of "circles" ("balls," we used to call them) of arbitrary diameter. Unless you can find a single size that fits perfectly, which you can't, you've proven nothing that geometrists haven't known for centuries.
Anyway -- seems we're still thinking about those pesky beam weapons, despite having shown you much less sinister mechanisms that provide the same "round holes," and are in fact completely consistent with the expected building performance. We've also shown you how your Star Wars weapon actually doesn't fit the "evidence" that you (and only you) see. Still, elsewhere, you've insisted that we treat this as a valid hypothesis. It must be tested, you say. The test is simple: Do beam weapons of this magnitude exist? No. Still doubting, eh? In that case, class, pull up a chair. Today we're going to design our own WTC Killing Beam Weapon of Doom to see just what one would look like. While the beam emitter itself could plausibly be a "black" project, something the Governmint doesn't want us to see, it would be dependent on much more mundane technologies -- launch vehicles, power systems, that kind of thing -- and still restrained by the laws of physics. While we may not know anything about the weapon itself, we can figure out the rest. So suppose an unsmiling man in a grey suit delivers a magical beam weapon to us, and insists we make it functional. All we know are its requirements. Some of these we can divine from what we saw on Sept. 11th. 1. Orbit The beam weapon must fire from almost directly above its target, and must do so unseen. If it fired at an angle, the beam -- allegedly capable of destroying the WTC towers -- would have cut through at an angle, leaving a quite interesting damage path, one that was not seen on TV. Likewise, TV cameras did not capture any blimps or dirigibles or large aircraft hovering high above the Towers. Thus, we assume the beam system was orbital. There are basically two choices for an orbital system: LEO (Low Earth Orbit) and GEO (Geosynchronous) or similar orbits. Both of these orbits have problems. Recall that not one tower was destroyed, but two. The South Tower fell at 9:59 AM, and the North Tower fell at 10:28. In LEO, the orbital period is a function of altitude, and the spacecraft orbits faster as it gets lower. However, the minimum usable orbit is about 90 minutes long. If the two different firings suggested happened on successive orbits, i.e. 29 minutes apart, the spacecraft altitude would have been below sea level. This is impossible. If the two firings occurred on the same orbit, we now require a much, much higher orbit. A true GEO orbit won't work either, since you only remain geostationary above the equator, otherwise the spacecraft will appear to oscillate north and south while retaining the same longitude. We need a firing angle that is just about straight down and stays that way for 30 minutes, or 1/48th of an orbit. A GEO track would move by a minimum of 7.5% of peak latitude, or over 1.6o of latitude, which may be unacceptable. So we would need to be much, much higher than GEO. The high-orbit situation is also impractical for two military reasons. First, high orbits require much larger rockets. Second, it severely limits your options, since it could take hours, days, or even forever to orient this beam on a particular target. The only practical solution, then, is to have two beam weapon satellites. We will assume these are orbiting in the cheapest orbit possible, i.e. LEO. 2. Beam Energy The beam must be capable of delivering a WTC-finishing blow in roughly 10 seconds. How much energy are we talking about? To make this exercise remotely plausible, we will consider a firing energy much lower than the tower destruction itself. For sake of argument, suppose the beam delivers 6.0 x 109 Joules of energy -- a number chosen because it is twice that of the aircraft impact kinetic energy, as calculated in Greening (pg. 10). This is an arbitrary choice but clearly a beam energy higher than the impacts is needed, since the impacts alone finished off neither structure. We further assume that the beam weapon is 50% efficient, an "ideal" figure (cutting-edge lasers built for efficiency are typically around 16% efficient). This means a total of 1.2 x 1010 Joules of energy must be supplied by the spacecraft, over a period of 10 seconds, or 1.2 x 109 Watts of power. That is the design requirement of our black-box beam weapon. It should be pointed out that we have neglected many efficiency-robbing problems to arrive at this figure -- attenuation by the atmosphere, for instance, and beam absorption or reflection by the target are both major concerns. In practice I would not be surprised to see an effective beam efficiency as low as 5% under ideal conditions. 3. Energy Storage As this power figure is roughly equivalent to the output of a commercial nuclear power plant, it is clear that our WKBWD satellite cannot provide this continuously, but must store the energy. This poses a big problem. The most obvious solution is battery power. The highest energy density rechargeable batteries currently envisioned (and these have not been qualified for space) can supply about 1 MJ / kg of battery mass. To supply the 1.2 x 1010 Joules we require, this means 12,000 kg of battery. But this figure cannot be trusted. Recall that we require a full discharge in only ten seconds. Batteries don't like this. They heat up, which increases their internal resistance and robs power, and chemical pathways become blocked, making much of its storage unavailable. Given this requirement, our battery size would need to be much larger -- Lithium ion batteries over 20 second peak load are limited to a mere 1500 W/kg. Since our beam requires 1.2 x 109 Watts, we would actually need 8,000 tons of battery. So batteries are out. What about capacitors? If we assume a spacecraft bus voltage of 1000 Volts (which is unacceptably high for space applications, as arcing would probably destroy our satellite), to reach our total energy requirement, E = 0.5 C V2, thus capacitance C = 24,000 Farads. This can be done with, say, ten tons of capacitors, however the leakage will be much higher -- rather than charging batteries over periods of weeks, the capacitors will require a much more rapid charge cycle, and any weight saved in the capacitors themselves will be lost to solar arrays and thermal management. The very last possibility is the extreme explosive compression flux generator, basically a one-shot motor that uses explosives to push a magnet and a coil. This is similarly "black" and exciting to Conspiracy Theorists, but not practical here either. While this little gadget can crank out a reported 1012 Watts, it only does so for a few microseconds. To sustain our ten-second beam, we would need about a million small copies of this, and they would have to somehow be shielded from each other. Alternatively, if we convinced the beam weapon designers to change their beam, so that it fired one extremely rapid pulse, we would only need a few thousand of these. In either case, the beam weapon would have to handle several million Amps of current, and somehow convert this into a useful, collimated beam. If anybody has any ideas how to do this, let me know. The best I can think of is a microwave waveguide -- but the biggest of these is Arecibo, it's four orders of magnitude weaker than we'd need, and it would clearly be seen orbiting the Earth! We also have a another stealth problem. If we generate a 1.2 x 1010 Joule energy pulse, that means we're setting off much more than 1.2 x 1010 Joules worth of explosives, or 3 tons TNT equivalent, in orbit. This can be done, provided we don't mind creating a flash in the upper atmosphere that would be clearly visible to the naked eye in full daylight, and provided we don't mind alerting the early warning systems of every nuclear-armed government in the process. 4. Launch Considerations Each of our proposed solutions above requires a satellite that masses over 10 tons for energy storage or generation above. Since the thermal control, solar generation, attitude control, and payload are also assumed to be significant, we may assume the power storage is reasonably close to a standard satellite MEL (Mass Equipment List) breakdown, and is thus around 10-25% of the total satellite mass. We thus estimate our spacecraft minimum mass is around 40 tons. This exceeds the launch capability of any current launch vehicle -- almost double that of the Shuttle -- although Saturn V could do it. Needless to say, this also isn't a good consideration for stealth. Any other launch would require on-orbit assembly, and a rather complicated one at that. The extremely high-power storage and supply would have to be bridged. Pointing on the beam weapon would be critical, requiring utmost precision. Lastly, this would mean that our astronauts are also members of the conspiracy. 5. Conclusion Orbital beam weapons, even if the beam technology itself was sound, are not practical as tools of overt domination or covert destruction of land-based targets. There is simply no way to generate the power required to destroy hardened structures, let alone destroy them so thoroughly as to remove evidence of the beam weapon's use. In legitimate studies, beam weapons have only been considered in cases where a much lower power (1 MW or less) can achieve a useful result, such as damaging fragile sensors or puncturing thin-walled critical structures, e.g. the booster of an ICBM. The fundamental roadblock is the ability to put power on the ground. As we saw above, the only credible approach is to use expendables, viz. explosives. In this case, the orbiting beam weapon offers no advantages over simply putting those same explosives on target. The difficulty and cost associated with the orbiting platform, coupled with the nonexistence of high performance beam emitters to begin with, makes this a complete non-starter. ----- Thank you all for your attention. There's a sign-up sheet for my two-week Mad Scientist Camp circulating somewhere near the back. |
Last edited by R.Mackey; 10th November 2006 at 12:30 PM. Reason: Minor error in GEO orbital mechanics |
|
10th November 2006, 12:42 PM | #394 |
Drunken Shikigami
Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 7,474
|
i still think TR-3B is the only way to go, lol
at an altitude of 120,000 feet is practically in orbit |
__________________
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. -Albert Einstein |
|
10th November 2006, 12:47 PM | #395 |
NWO Kitty Wrangler
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 29,690
|
R.Mackey, remind me to buy you a beer if we ever meet. I think we'd get along great. Oh, and Nominated! My first, I'm so proud!
|
__________________
Obviously, that means cats are indeed evil and that ownership or display of a feline is an overt declaration of one's affiliation with dark forces. - Cl1mh4224rd |
|
10th November 2006, 01:08 PM | #396 |
Fiend God
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: In a post-fact world
Posts: 96,875
|
A beer ? I wanna buy him a CAR!
|
10th November 2006, 01:13 PM | #397 |
NWO Kitty Wrangler
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 29,690
|
R.Mackey mentions in passing how critical aiming the weapon would be. A quick calculation shows, for an orbit of only 100 miles, the towers would subtend an angle of only 80 arcseconds, or about 0.02 degrees. This would require aiming as good as a typical rifleman, which could be maintained over the entire firing time, twice. Any higher orbit makes the problem even worse.
Any vibration during firing would tend to draw you off target, and so any device able to overcome the problems listed by Mackey must also do it with an absolute minimum of vibration, or some sort of real-time active beam control. |
__________________
Obviously, that means cats are indeed evil and that ownership or display of a feline is an overt declaration of one's affiliation with dark forces. - Cl1mh4224rd |
|
10th November 2006, 01:15 PM | #398 |
NWO Kitty Wrangler
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 29,690
|
|
__________________
Obviously, that means cats are indeed evil and that ownership or display of a feline is an overt declaration of one's affiliation with dark forces. - Cl1mh4224rd |
|
10th November 2006, 04:51 PM | #399 |
NWO Master Conspirator
Join Date: Mar 2003
Posts: 59,856
|
|
__________________
Vive la liberté! |
|
10th November 2006, 07:56 PM | #400 |
Merchant of Doom
Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Not in Hell, but I can see it from here on a clear day...
Posts: 15,112
|
R. Mackey:
Beam weapons from space are not feasible for another reason, as well. You can make a weapon just as deadly at a much lower cost and weight. A simple kinetic energy weapon from orbit could be devastating. Imaging a 5 ton aerodynamic ceramic slug, with a sensor package and guidance fins, dropped (and thus accelerating) from a high orbit. A propulsion system to slow it down is all you need for it to fall. Laser? Bah, keep 'em Just for some math: GEO is around 42,000km. We'll assume a 5,000kg slug. Given our distance, we can calculate how long it would take for it to hit the ground (assuming no initial "push" downward and disregarding air resistence...which would only affect the very last 100km or so). The equation is t = SQRT(2*h/g), where h is the height and g is gravitic acceleration. With g=9.8m/s2 and h=42,000,000m, we can come up with about 20,200s (I rounded down). Now, we can figure how fast it'd be going when it hits. Velocity = g*t, so we get 197,960 m/s. A pretty good clip. We know that KE=1/2 mv2, so we can figure the energy here. We come up with 97,970,404,000,000 J...about 900 times the energy Mackey was working with for the laser beam. |
__________________
History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells "Can't you remember anything I told you?" and lets fly with a club. - John w. Campbell |
|
Thread Tools | |
|
|