"Dean Ing - Firefight Y2K" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ing Dean)

Personnel seekers include the "gnat" concept, a tiny guided missile no bigger than a hornet which seeks a
source of motion, heat, or noise. The gnat might fly no faster than a sparrowhawk, but could carry and
fire a slug at point of contact. The gnat would probably be a submunition, carried by the hundreds in a
mortar round for dispersion by air. They'd also play hell with enemy helicopter blades. . . .

Finally, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a field of study that might help us detect any given
substance, such as Russian gun-oil. Or NMR just might let us destroy very specific molecules using a
maser beam. Hemoglobin, which carries oxygen in the blood, is a specific chemical. The maser might
even be tuneable so that the victim develops mild cyanosis without lethal effects. Sometimes we want
casualties, not kills. Think of a hostage situation. Enough said.

After chewing on schemes for acquisition, energy transmission, and effects for a few days, we put them
together in various ways. A favorite systems concept from all this was the fighting pod, an outgrowth of
today's experimental flying platform. It might be scarcely larger than a motorcycle sidecar. Our podman
learns where the enemy is on his heads-up display from sensors, perhaps the laser IFF we mentioned.
From the safety of this flyable, molded carbon-filament-and-kapton fighting pod that doubles as battle
armor and is powered by a turbine or laser beam, he guides unmanned munition pods to picked spots by
voice command and uses his heads-up display to find targets. He can range across and above the
battlefield, calling for more munitions as necessary and serving as fire coordinator of several dedicated
munition pods as he chooses, then turn to fresh targets.
This may seem like heresy to anyone who thinks of today's combat rifleman as a romantic figure, but a
dozen men in fighting pods, controlling two hundred dispersed munition pods, could stand off a regiment
of ordinary troops. If wounded, our podman could be carried to safety on an emergency zigzag course
by his pod's automatic pilot.

The pod might be the ultimate fighting suit. The podman can move miles in minutes; he can remain
invulnerable to strobe munitions or other sensory overloads by using outside sensors; his armor should
stop most small-arms fire and nerve gas as well; and the pod can take him out of the zone fast. We can
envision seafaring and spacefaring versions of the pod, which could just as easily be called a life-support
system.

I left Battelle with some heady visions of future small arms systems, not knowing which ones will see a
production line. But one panelist kept us from feeling too cocky. He reminded us that writer Robert
Heinlein described many of those concepts years ago inStarship TroopersтАФ but then, Heinlein himself is
an Annapolis trained engineer. That's fitting.




MILLENNIAL POSTSCRIPT
At the turn of the millennium we're still trying to develop a helmet display that gives a warrior enough
information without bewildering him. I've seen some of the recent experimental displays for military pilots,
some designed by onetime military pilots. Though the displays are improved, they still aren't quite ready
for prime time. Maximum data isn't always optimum; the problem is still information overload.

Antimatter weapons are finally on our horizon since antimatter itself is now an acceptable topic in
scholarly journals. Propulsion physicist Dr. Robert Forward, also a highly respected SF novelist, prefers
the phrase "mirror matter." He produced theMirror Matter Newsletter from 1986 until 1990 to provide
news on the applications of stored antimatter. He ceased its publication when standard channels of
physicists began to supplant his newsletter adequately. That's one way of saying that particular future isn't