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

into patterns across an area, like finger-taps. Sightless people wearing this equipment can walk down a
street as if sighted, feeling painless taps in special patterns across their backs to warn of cars, curbs, and
other people. It should be possible to improve this equipment so that a soldier could wear it as part of his
battle dress. Will the information it adds be worth the trouble? It's still too early to tell.

Energy Transmission and Storage concepts ranged all the way from tiny rotary engines to beamed
microwave power. Early in the next century, men may have to fight on the surface of the moon. They will
need electrical power to run some of their systems. If our man is in deep shadow, he can't use solar
power. Could he actually use an oxygen-breathing Wankel rotary engine to power a tiny generator on an
airless planet? Sure he could; engine-driven torpedoes have carried their own oxygen supplies for many
years, and Lord knows there's less back-pressure in a vacuum!

Other energy storage candidates include batteries, ultracapacitors, and even very small particle-bed
nuclear power generators. The main problem is to devise a safe power of very high energy density and
reasonable cost. Whatever you use, you don't want an enemy bullet to turn it into a bomb. A particle-bed
reactor won't need refueling for a long timeтАФbut if it fails catastrophically, you won't care. A capacitor
delivers a wallop of power, but must then be recharged. Small flywheels can store tremendous amounts
of energy inside three-axis gimbaled mountsтАФbut when that flywheel reaches the limit of its tensile
strength, it is a frag grenade on your back. Superfilament materials are under development so that we can
spin those flywheels a lot faster with safety, using them to run generators.

Smokeless powder and explosives are old-fashioned energy storage systems, though we seem to have
reached a plateau there. But we may reach higher plateaus. The wizards of propellant chemistry say there
are ways to make very dense propellant molecules. If we can cram twice as much energy into a small
bazooka round, we might penetrate thicker armor or carry more rounds. We could also power very
compact turbines capable of running small high-output generators, or of lifting heavy loads. TAKE
NOTE.

The far-out chemical storage systems include metastable helium and antimatter. Metastable helium is a
material that only exists in theory, proposed by Zmuidzinas of CalTech. If it can be processed and safely
kept, we'll have an energy source that can be squirted into a chamber in very small amounts, yielding
tremendous amounts of heat. It could power turbines, rockets, or projectile launchers, though nowhere
near as powerful as antimatter.

Antimatter is the ultimate energy source. The stuff is out of the science-fiction bag and into the lab.
Switzerland's CERN facility has kept antiprotons circulating in a huge storage ring for over three days.
That's the first step toward creating and storing antihydrogen. The energy of antimatter, when it touches
"normal" matter, is simply staggering. It doesn't just give up some tiny fraction of its mass of energy; it is
totally converted to energy. Ounce for ounce it is thousands of times more powerful than an atomic
weapon, but we should be able to control it like a tiny reactor. No, it won't be available within the next
few years. Yes, they're working on it at Fermilab near Chicago. The soldier who carried an
antimatter-powered beam weapon might have only a tenth of a gram of the stuff in its magnetic bottle, but
if struck by an enemy bullet, that bottle would blow a very large crater. Solution: keep it inside your
armor. That's the drawback of very high energy density: if your energy source fails catastrophically, you
might not survive.

Power can be transmitted by laser or microwave; in fact, a small helicopter has already flown using
electrical power beamed from a ground-based microwave source. TAKE NOTE. If we carry this
concept to the infantryman, we must design very compact receiving equipment and see that each man
gets power on demand.