It sounds cool.  Northrop Grumman, makers of many fine military technologies, has delivered the first production-line quality laser ray gun to the United States Air Force.  A fine achievement indeed.

At first glance anyway.

The Joint High Power Solid State Laser program is intended to one day deliver a 100 kilowatt cannon capable of all sorts of cool things.  Only it has yet to deliver a final end product, as the production of the electricity to power such a laser gun in any sort of mobile platform involves extremely hazardous chemicals.

So insetad of delivering that, we get the Vesta II, a teeny tiny little 15 kW laser. It’s hard to even classify it as a weapon, in that about all it can really do is hurt a lot or maybe, with enough time, explode exposed explosives.  (Say that ten times fast.)

Still, that we’ve got a production-line quality laser “weapon” at all is a huge step forward … I guess.  I mean it’s better than, say, not having any production-line quality ray guns for our military to play with.  I guess it at least allows all sorts of testing and design and consideration to be done.  It’s a step along the way to something cool, even if it’s kind of a letdown itself.

In a time when national financial stability is so questionable though, it could be the wrong time to trumpet any project that fails to deliver bang for the buck.

So I just watched Cloverfield from Comcast On Demand.  I’m sorry that I payed five bucks to see it.  Maybe two might have been more about what it’s worth.  Which, I guess, makes a good rating system.  Two dollars out of five.  Heh heh.  Anyway…

So … what the flirk?!  Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla.  They even had to put in the runny nose scene.  I could have done without that, thanks.

Stupid big alien thing wipes out tons of military.  How in the world did that thing not get killed?  I mean maybe if it had technology, like shields or something … maybe.  But no.  It’s just a big fleshy thing and even carpet bombing it didn’t phase it any?  Come on!  I don’t care how big it is, flesh can only take so much punishment!

The little bugs were a cute touch.  Not really inspired, mind you.  Just like yet another zergling swarm.  Heck, even then they were hardly original.  Sci-fi loves a good bug swarm.  Still, the movie was better having them than not.

But come on!  Are people really so stupid?  And I don’t just mean the whole brave insane and assured death for love bit.  You know, the romantic in me likes to believe that much at least could happen.  But why does no one ever arm themselves?  I mean freaking hell!  They saw the bug swarm and did nothing.  Then they lost one of their group to the bugs and did nothing.  Then they kill one on their way back from the rescue and leave the damn fire ax embedded in the bug like it just had to be alone.  And it was alone! Bad writing there.  But I guess killing them all before they’d suffered even more would have been bad form.  Or something.

Still, why is it in so very many movies, people never pick up a damn weapon?  Aliens shooting you with ray guns while your military has machine guns and you have a breech-fed shotgun?  Don’t pick up the dead soldier’s machine gun and spare ammo.  Don’t pick up the alien’s ray gun and energy packs.  Just keep your shotgun, and when you run out of ammo, throw it at an alien.  Nerf!  So freaking stupid, and yet nearly every movie and TV show runs along those lines.  I mean drop me into a situation like that and I’d  be freaking armed to the teeth with every damn gun I could carry.  Over every piece of armor I could put on myself!

Or something like that.

And I mean, I know it’s New York and they don’t have like normal buildings, but sheesh, you’d think you could hole yourself up somewhere.

If I were in like an alien invasion or zombie movie, the first thing I’d do is run to the nearest super Walmart (or something similar) and weld all but one door closed.  I don’t care if I have to rip panelling out of some back down to weld over the glass doors out front, I am making that building secure!  Then I’d set up all of the generators in the dock area to make a generator room.  All of the ventillation is getting similarly reinforced, and HEPA filtered to hell and back.  And I’d arm myself with whatever shotguns and such they’ve got in there and keep the refrigerated and frozen food as cold as I could once the power goes out.  If it goes out.  There’d still be plenty of unperishables and bottled water and such in there too, but go through the perishables first because they won’t last as long.

But anyway, the point is once you’re in a defensible position, then you start messing around with looking for survivors or striking back or whatever.  Secure yourself.  Set yourself up for a long siege.  And then do stuff.

I’d probably even make my sleeping quarters suspended from the ceiling so that if a zombie somehow walked in, I’d still be way over his head, out of reach.  I’m not sure what I’d do if it were aliens, like in Cloverfield.  But it’d basically amount to the same of first setting up a secure perimiter.

So when all of those people are running around, running across the bridge, running through the city, et cetera - I’d have been finding a place to set up shop, collecting guns and ammo and food and water, and welding the damned doors closed and securing the windows and air vents with reinforcements of steel, steel, and more steel.  Let the invaders get through that.  I’ve seen enough zombie and alien invasion movies to know that you don’t run around all willy nilly.  If you’re going to survive, you’ve got to be smart from the beginning.

And you’ve got to accept that people will die.  No freaking bug/zombie-bitten refugees in my camp!  Want to stay in my domain?  First you’re going to sit in a quarentine room with everyone else.  I’ve seen Alien.  I’m gonna make sure no little bugger bursts out of your stomach.  Or that you don’t turn into some monster yourself.

I really don’t get how these people survive in these movies.  Well, other than “it was in the script”.  Bad writing.  I think Cloverfield sets a new low standard there.  Who the heck is going to run around carrying a camera like that through all of that?  Oh my god!  Alien bugs are trying to eat me!  Let me film it!  I don’t think so.

I know.  I’m rambling.  I’m not feeling so well.  But yeah … I’m waiting for the day when an intelligent movie of that genre is made.  Cloverfield certainly isn’t one.

Okay, so my somewhat recent review of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. might have been a tad premature on my part. I hadn’t put that many hours into it at that time. I’ve toyed with it some more on and off since then.

I still stand by my review.

So by now I’ve gotten a hold of a few increasingly accurate SMGs. Some with scopes. I’m not convinced that they’re the 4x scope claimed. I’m also not sure why people would even bother with a crappy little 4x scope. Oh, right, because the weapons still are rather inaccurate. Better, but still not even rifle quality. And why are there no rifles yet? Beats the heck out of me. I’ve got two RPGs. I’ve got a six-pack grenade launcher. I’ve got a sawed-off shotgun. I’ve got a combat shotgun modified with a gravi artifact if I remember correctly. I’ve got a pistol modified to fire rifle rounds. I’ve got various pistols and sub-machine guns up the wazoo. But no rifle. And especially no long-range sniper rifle with a high powered scope. I don’t get it. I really don’t. I expect I’ll probably find some laser gun before I find a single simple accurate long-range bolt-action rifle.

I guess stalkers just aren’t snipers.

And I’m still amazed at how bad some elements of the game are. Clear an area. Trigger a quest element. Watch that area suddenly be occupied by god and country again. Or better yet, my personal favorite. Clear an area. Start dragging bodies off to the side and sorting through the gear of the dead. Then watch some random punk just suddenly spawn in out of the corner of your eye. Just bam, teleports in! What, they couldn’t even wait for you to clear that map? And they couldn’t designate a spawn-in point at a distance and make him walk over? And they don’t even give you a moment to sort through the gear? They just send in the clones?!

On the plus side, once you know to expect it, you can rather rack up a lot of ammo. Just wait for the clone to pop in, hit him before he sees you so that you don’t get shot, grab his gear, drag the body over to the burning pile, and wait for the next one. Who needs money for ammo when you have teleporting clones?

Yeah. The game is that bad. Not even Doom, which has teleportation, does it that badly.

As I said before, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has a lot of interesting concepts and good ideas. Unfortunately the game is so rough and unpolished that it’s more crap than gem. And the sad part is, it really wouldn’t have taken all that much more work to polish it.

Okay, moving on. Next up is a movie I just caught on FX called Equilibrium. It’s a weird little movie. It takes place after World War 3 hits, sometime in the early 21st Century. As a side note, I like the vagueness there. How many sci-fi movies give dates, only to make us laugh ourselves silly when that day comes and the future is actually nothing like the prediction.

But back to Equilibrium. So a fascist government run by “The Father” decides that war is caused by emotion. The solution? Everyone, every day, shoots themselves up with emotion-suppressing drugs. And a military-like police force that’s half religious (for that added “un-emotional” zeal?) is formed. They hunt down all works of art, literature, etc. that provoke emotion and burn them. And equally, hunt down all people who smuggle and treasure these items, and burn them. Or put a bullet through them if they try to fight back.

And at the top of this weird police force are “clerics”, who train in a weird martial art specializing in pistols.

Now, I’ve never actually liked whenever guns get combined with martial arts. I’ve personally always seen guns as rather being the antithesis of martial arts. There’s something about personal energy and a forced responsibility for your actions in martial arts, where as guns to me have always been rather an impersonal energyless void of a way to maim or kill someone.

That said, the martial arts in this movie are awe inspiring, and even to an extent force me to admit that if someone tried, they could indeed put the spirit back into the firearm. It’s just amazing. In my opinion the choreography just blows away movies like The Matrix or Ultra Violet.

But kick-asterisk fight scenes aside, the basic premise is also cute. It provokes thought. I can’t say that it’s in any way believable, nor even entirely logical. But it at least gives one pause to wonder, and that itself is awfully rare in movies these days. I say, if you haven’t seen it, give it a shot. The plot is not exactly surprising, but at least done well. The action is good. Emotion is provoked. And all-in-all it’s far better than most of the tripe out there. I’d actually give it four out of five blazing pistols. Or should that be burning books…

The funny thing is, having just watched that movie, I then hop onto my computer to find report of something akin to it (though in a much smaller sense) happening over in the UK. It seems that across the pond is brewing a bill, the UK Criminal Justice Bill, that itself perhaps goes a tad too far to police their state? Specifically I bring up Clause 63, which illegalizes “extreme pornographic images”. What is an “extreme pornographic image”? It doesn’t say. But having laws against specific ones like child pornography, it certainly can’t be those. With such vague wording, this is something new. And unfortunately very open to broad interpretation.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that perhaps the internet could use a bit of cleaning up. You can’t search for adam from eve without running across gobs of porn. Some sort of regulation to at least separate the wheat from the chaff would be nice.

That said, making it illegal to have downloaded (intentionally or unintentionally … such as having happened to just run an image search or read a blog with one tasteless spot) images of sexuality that someone considers “extreme”, seems a tad … fascist? Why would it be perfectly legal to perform the act, but not legal to view a picture of it. Where does that ill-fated line between “right” and “wrong” belong? And what government dare tread so far across that line as to extend themselves well past the inspiration of man in the enjoyment of something so wonderfully fun as sex? Making it illegal to download pictures of an illegal act I can see. But making it illegal to download pictures of a legal act lest it, what, promote more legal behavior, is not something you’d expect from any sane modern government.

**cough** America’s Fair Use copyrights being trod on left and right by the government under the offer of campaign funds pressure of the RIAA. **cough**

So I guess every country has its abusers of the law. And by that I don’t mean the general public. I mean those making the law.

Still, fear of theoretical monetary damage from copyright abuse is almost something plausible. Generally unstoppable, but almost plausible.

Where as fear of seeing a picture of an “extreme” (whatever that means) sex act theoretically leading to legal behavior in the privacy of one’s own home between consenting adults? And this is a danger or harm to anyone … how? It’s just loony if you ask me. Let’s hope rights over in the UK aren’t actually spiraling down the toilet as fast as they are over here in the USA.

Where does one draw that line between protecting a populace and oppressing them?

The US Navy continues development on railguns. And why not? The only other military outfit with giant cannons is the Army, but how can tank-based weaponry compare to the massive cannons on Navy ships? If any military branch has the sheer scale of size to make a railgun feasable, it’s the Navy. So we spend millions (billions?) to make the next cool weapon - railguns.

So far, the Navy’s best test is with a muzzle energy of 10 megajoules. Though the device they’re testing theoretically can go up to 32 megajoules. They’re just slowly increasing the power, probably because they don’t want to break it before they’ve gotten lots of good data out of it. And I’m sure they’ll build bigger and better ones yet.

For those of you not in the know, a railgun shoots a projectile - hence the ‘gun’ in the name. But instead of using gunpowder a railgun plops its bullet on two ‘rails’. The bullet itself completes a channel of electricity that creates a powerful magnetic field which moves the bullet. As the bullet moves, touching the rails in new places, the field automatically moves perfectly with it because it’s the bullet that in effect creates it. Thus a perfect use of electromagnetism to shoot bullets at unheard of speeds. Mach 3? No problem. Mach 7? Sure. Why not? And that’s still just the beginning of the speeds a railgun is capable of. And since e=mc², or in laymans terms the energy of the projectile when it hits you is its mass multiplied by the square of its speed. So the faster it is the harder it hits - by a lot more than just making a bigger bullet. So now you see where big speeds mean big damage and thus why the railgun is so cool.

But the railgun has two major flaws.

The first is that e=mc² is not just the amount of energy of damage the bullet inflicts when it hits. It is also the amount of energy you have to put into the gun to fire the bullet at that speed. Railguns eat up a lot of electricity. They need not just a massive source of electricity, but capacitors- nay super capacitors capable of storing and instantaneously kicking out ludicrous of amounts of electricity - without blowing up, melting down, or otherwise breaking after the first shot. Railguns are expensive to manufacture.

The second is that the bullet has to literally rub along the rails to create that magnetic field. Well you replace the bullet each time so the damage to the bullet isn’t a concern. But you also damage the rails each time you fire the railgun. Those aren’t so easy to just replace like loading in a new bullet. The rails run the length of the barrel. You’re talking about a major repair necessary for the gun to continue working after about every five shots or so. How well do you think that’ll work in a combat situation?

The first flaw is easy for us to work on. We can make better capacitors. We can add more into arrays of them. We can build bigger electrical power plants. Just throw more mass at it. Build it bigger, you get more. It’s the second flaw that is the real kicker. Either we have to design expendable rails that are easy to replace, or we have to come up with a way to prevent that damage caused by a hypersonic bullet scraping along them. Even if we could levitate the bullet slightly over the rails like in a maglev train, at those speeds the air friction alone is going to be one nasty customer.

Will we ever have a railgun that works in the field? I don’t know. It’s a cool bit of tech, that’s for sure. But frankly, I see lasers working long before I see railguns working. The rails are the railgun’s biggest advantage, and its greatest weakness. Time will tell if we can ever find a solution.