Weird California sighting

Silverbug indeed....SG7 causing all sorts of confusion.

Lockheed Martin's Multiple Kill Vehicle has been publicly demo'ing very high maneuverability since at least "1999":



A more recent vid from "2008" seems to show not much improvement:



Strange then that Raytheon received contract funding in 2015 for a very similar sounding project

MKV,more lives than Metal Storm it seems..

a reply to: Blackfinger

I cant remember what the comment was or who made it but someone suggested the issue was scalability when originally posted.

If you pause the first vid. at 26 seconds you get an entirely different perspective.

a reply to: Jukiodone

That is terrifying. The sound, the whole breathing fire in all directions, just terrifying.

originally posted by: Jukiodone
a reply to: Blackfinger

I cant remember what the comment was or who made it but someone suggested the issue was scalability when originally posted.

If you pause the first vid. at 26 seconds you get an entirely different perspective.

Is that perspective just showing it is smaller than it might seem, or are you pointing out the giant door and I should assume they have one big enough to require a door that size?

I assume former, but hoping latter.

On a side note, I went through the Raytheon link. Doesn't this go against international laws regarding weaponizing space and what not? Not that I know these laws but I have certainly heard about them. It seems to me after thinking about it that could be a strong reason alone for Governments staying black on craft that are capable of F'ing up everything in space and outside of it.

Having typed that, if you had those craft and they could really do that you could pretty much tell the international community to kiss your ass, but that isn't very diplomatic. Either way it seems that aside from all of the other great reasons to keep them black this would also be one of them.

a reply to: Jukiodone

I just want to make sure I re-iterate that "Silver Bug"
is MY OWN MONIKER and NOT an officialy assigned
or defacto codename for any of the high maneuverability
craft that you have outlined in the youtube videos.

The craft I have seen on video is SPECIFICALLY
X-24 or X-38 shaped much like a lifting body
aircraft BUT outfitted with a non-exhaust
producing propulsion system of which
I have its CAD drawing or three and
because of the CAD drawings' sources,
I would need to cleanup those quite
extensively so as not to "burn" them!

It is DEFINITELY NOT shaped in any way
like the LMCO Multi-Kill vehicle displayed
in the youtube videos above!

Because of the flight-over-cumulous cloud taken
from chase plane description, I have already received
an online indication that SOMEONE knows which craft
I am talking about and basically they told me to "Just Drop It!"

Of course, I am going to just IGNORE that admonition,
because I don't take threats kindly, and just to make
sure CERTAIN PARTIES UNDERSTAND....I have friends
in certain high-level positions with VERY REAL AND
VERY PHYSICAL FIREPOWER available.....and to
quote Tarantino:

"Say WHAT again. Say WHAT again, I dare you,
I double dare you mother*******, say WHAT one
more G******* time!"

or put it another way.....I haf vaays to make you talk !!!!!

;-) :-) :-) ;-)

a reply to: sputniksteve

The only thing the treaty on space based weapons actually prohibit are nuclear weapons permanently based in orbit. It doesn't prevent firing weapons that go into space, that then return, or even orbiting non-nuclear weapons in permanent orbit.

originally posted by: sputniksteve

originally posted by: Jukiodone
a reply to: Blackfinger



"Is that perspective just showing it is smaller than it might seem, or are you pointing out the giant door and I should assume they have one big enough to require a door that size?

I assume former, but hoping latter."

The size of the door has nothing to do with the size of the kill vehicle.

These tests are conducted at the Air Force Hover Test Facility located on Leuhman Ridge on the extreme Northeast boundary of Edwards Air Force Base. As I recall, the Hover Test Facility was constructed on top of one of the old test stands originally built for development of the Saturn's F-1 engine. The last time I was there was more than 20 years ago, so my memory may be a little rusty.

These Kinetic Kill Vehicles (KKVs) are actually pretty high performance rocket stages and generally burn Hydrazine-Nitrogen Tetroxide propellants (or similar). There are only a few places that are licensed to store and burn these very gnarly chemicals and vent the combustion products into the air; the Rocket Site at Edwards is one of them.

The KKVs themselves are loaded into the hover test area (enclosed by the nets) on a pylon that rises up from the floor. The door is there to (1) vent the exhaust gases to the outside and (2) allow star trackers on the KKVs to track stars in the night sky. (Tracking the stars is how they determine that the KKV would be capable of tracking a moving target while firing its thrusters.)

edit on 19-10-2016 by 1947boomer because: Text accidentally deleted

a reply to: sputniksteve

The size of the door has nothing to do with the size of the kill vehicle.

These tests are conducted at the Air Force Hover Test Facility located on Leuhman Ridge on the extreme Northeast boundary of Edwards Air Force Base. As I recall, the Hover Test Facility was constructed on top of one of the old test stands originally built for development of the Saturn's F-1 engine. The last time I was there was more than 20 years ago, so my memory may be a little rusty.

These Kinetic Kill Vehicles (KKVs) are actually pretty high performance rocket stages and generally burn Hydrazine-Nitrogen Tetroxide propellants (or similar). There are only a few places that are licensed to store and burn these very gnarly chemicals and vent the combustion products into the air; the Rocket Site at Edwards is one of them.

The KKVs themselves are loaded into the hover test area (enclosed by the nets) on a pylon that rises up from the floor. The door is there to (1) vent the exhaust gases to the outside and (2) allow star trackers on the KKVs to track stars in the night sky. (Tracking the stars is how they determine that the KKV would be capable of tracking a moving target while firing its thrusters.)

a reply to: Zaphod58

Thank you Zaph, that doesn't make much more sense. The more I thought about it the more I realized that my original assumptions would be silly. I appreciate you clarifying. Either way having a bunch of those floating around anywhere is intimidating to just about anyone I would think. Shoot, even if they were "ours".



a reply to: 1947boomer

Star Tracking? I think I am way under estimating the ramifications of what is possible, and what is happening. In that case I would assume they are autonomous? Or at least you would want them to be to a certain degree, while not being completely without manual control. Either way you can color me fascinated.

If you happen to know, are they capable of operating for very long at the size they are in the demo? I wouldn't imagine they would be able to hold very much fuel, especially while on earth. What are the complications with building bigger ones, and is there even a need for bigger ones?

What kind of weapons would it utilize? I can't imagine they would be traditional. I understand these questions probably cannot answered.

It all comes down to range..More range equals more fuel equals bigger rocket.

a reply to: sputniksteve

If I was a LMCO engineer (and I'm NOT!),
I would put a MetalStorm gun on it with
a 180 degree rotating head for anti-tank
or other anti-materiel use.

I would also kill the use of the rather TOXIC
Hydrazine and use Compressed Natural Gas
at 10,000 PSI or higher (my normal 22 litre internal volume
steel High Pressure dive tanks are at already at around 3400 PSI)
so Titanium 25 litre Internal Volume tanks could be rated as high
as 12,000 PSI !!!!!

Barlow's formula P=(2St/D) * 0.85; (usually set for high grade steels but Titanium works too!)

P=Bursting preassure in psi.
S=tensile strengthof material in tube wall in PSI. (sometimes called yeild strength in PSI)
t=Wall thickness in inches.
D=Outside diameter in inches.
0.85 = add an extra 15% safety factor for calculcated theoretical maximum burst pressure.

So may I suggest 25 litre internal volume 4 inch thick-walled
Titanium cylinders at 10 inches outside diameter to hold the
12000 PSI or so of Compressed Natural Gas --- That should give
more than an hour of pulsed rocket-like performance...!!!!

I should note that the WEIGHT of the gas-filled tank will be
much more than 1000 lbs! but still...someone could start with
my VERY VERY BASIC unchecked calculations and work from
there to make that above youtube video's high maneuverability
machine to work safer and better !!!!

a reply to: sputniksteve

They're hit to kill weapons. They're launched after a missile launch is detected, the kill vehicle that's in the video, separates from the booster, tracks the incoming warhead, and hits it, destroying it.

a reply to: sputniksteve

"Star Tracking? I think I am way under estimating the ramifications of what is possible, and what is happening. In that case I would assume they are autonomous? Or at least you would want them to be to a certain degree,"

The job of a KKV is to fly out and run into a missile coming (more or less) in the other direction. It destroys the target (and itself, of course) by making physical contact with the target thereby converting all its kinetic energy into a shock wave that travels through the mass of the target. To do that, it needs to know where the target is in real time and be able to go like hell to get to the interception point. So, a typical KKV is basically a rocket-propelled telescope. The telescope needs to be capable of seeing the target let's say, a couple of hundred KM away and the rocket propulsion system has to impart (typically) a few km/sec of velocity to the KKV. The wavelengths and pixel size that the telescope operates at are classified. Also, importantly, the KKV has to be continually adjusting its course to hit the interception point all the way up to the moment of impact. That's what those little thrusters are for that are shooting out the side. A KKV typically has one large thruster that fires along the long axis of the vehicle and supplies the bulk of the delta-v required to make it to the interception point, while the small thrusters make the vehicle jog left or right, up or down to keep the interception point centered in the telescope. Because the KKV is making course adjustments all the way up to the last fraction of a second, its terminal control has to be automated. Long range sensors on the ground, in the air, or in space are necessary to detect a launch and determine the approximate trajectory of the incoming target. That trajectory information is handed off to the KKV launcher which decides when it should launch.

"If you happen to know, are they capable of operating for very long at the size they are in the demo? I wouldn't imagine they would be able to hold very much fuel, especially while on earth. What are the complications with building bigger ones, and is there even a need for bigger ones? "

From simple orbital dynamics and without getting into classified or ITAR information, it is possible to derive my conclusion that a few Km/sec of delta-v is needed to have a high probability of getting an intercept at a distance from the KKV launch point that is far enough away to be useful. From the basic rocket equation you can work out that somewhere in the vicinity of one half the liftoff weight of the KKV has to be fuel. (More or less, because I'm deliberately being vague and it also depends on how many stages you want in your interceptor.) Knowing the specific impulse of the likely propellant combinations, you can work out that the burn time of a KKV is likely to be only a couple of minutes, at best. (It has to be a short time, because you don't have very much time to perform the intercept once the target comes into view over the horizon.)

"What kind of weapons would it utilize? "

The only weapon it uses is kinetic energy. From the above, you can work out that the closing velocity between the KKV and the target could be in the range of about 10 Km/sec. It turns out that at a speed of about 2.7 Km/sec, the amount of kinetic energy in a 1 Kg piece of inert matter is the same as the explosive energy in 1 Kg of TNT moving at 0 Km/sec. So the kinetic energy of a collision at 10 Km/sec is more than 10 times more energetic than if the colliding object was made of TNT and attached to the target.

With this kind of energy release, even a small KKV could take out a target as big as the Space Shuttle. There is no need for large KKVs--there aren't any space-based targets big enough to require it.

a reply to: 1947boomer

Hey sir.

I just wanted to chime in and say its an absolute pleasure to see you post here once again.

Hope to see more of you here in the future.


Dave

a reply to: 1947boomer

".... The telescope needs to be capable of seeing the target let's say, a couple
of hundred KM away and the rocket propulsion system has to impart (typically)
a few km/sec of velocity to the KKV. The wavelengths and pixel size that the
telescope operates at are classified. ..."

For through the clouds power, 2.5 GHZ to 15 GHZ microwaves should about do it.
Otherwise I would use a 30 GHZ to 60 GHZ system is used for accuracy!

If you want ground penetrating power try 200 MHZ to 2.6 GHZ

For sweep rates, we use 4096 pixels by 2160 pixels at 32 bits per pixel
at 10,000 frames per sample window is accurate for objects speeding
at 5000 KMH or faster or about 353,894,400,000 bytes per second
or 353.89 gigabytes per second.

At 1.5 GHZ and 48 GigaFLOPS for a single XYLINX FPGA chip
you only need 24 of them to do the processing using a
three frames comparison operation per object for motion
tracking on a 3D-XYZ volumetric basis using SOBEL edge-detection,
Edge Enhancement and Hi-pass/low-pass filtering and de-noising.

From there, send the detected objects to a spline-curve vectorization
system another 24 Xylinx chips so I can do realtime object feature categorization
and recognition on an internal database so I can differentiate between terrain
features, chaff, rockets, missiles, planes, boats, cars, people, etc.

Then I target the top, middle and bottom parts of the detected outlines
and shoot a tungsten-rod at about 160,000 KPH using a 80 foot linear induction
system and kill that missile DEAD IN THE WATER !!!

Cost-wise it's only $6000 per 1.5 GHZ Xylinx FPGA chip so for less
than $288,000 I can auto-hunt a whole wack of incoming missiles !!!!

if you need the source code for all the edge detection and outline
vectorization and database object feature recognition, I've got that !!!
I coded it all myself in both C++ and Delphi Pascal !!!!!

Works great on even a few AMD S9150 GPU cards !!!
It can hunt, find, target and kill 65,000+ objects per second !!!!!

a reply to: StargateSG7

ugh spell check...it should be Xilinx FPGA (NOT Xylinx!) for use
in a linear-induction-based Radar-detection-oriented kinetic
kill vehicle and missile intercept system.

THIS ONE SHOULD WORK JUST FINE:

www.xilinx.com...

You could also use LIDAR on a clear day for really high-speed detection
and ranging but I would rather do 2.5 GHZ up to 15 GHZ for a combination
of good cloud penetration and good speed plus a small and accurate pixel
size at 8.84 microseconds per pulse (i.e. pixel) with a horizontal sweep
of 0.043 degrees per 8.84 microsecond pulse (horizontal pixel size)
and vertical 0.043 degrees sweep per 8.84 microsecond pulse
(vertical pixel size) for a 180 degree horizontal and vertical
object detection viewspace when using square aspect ratio
4096 by 4096 pixel radar window frame sampling sizes.

I can ALSO use the 16:9 aspect ratio 4096x2160 pixels
window frame size at a 180 degrees horizontal by
101.25 degrees vertical radar window sweep at
0.043 horizontal and vertical degrees per each
8.84 microsecond pulse, instead of the 1:1 square
aspect ratio radar sweep window so that processing
can be done on CHEAP 4K GPU graphics cards
($600 for an 11 TeraFLOP AMD Fury-X) if the
Xilinx FPGA solution is a bit too expensive for you.

If using Xilinx or similar FPGA or high-end GPU chips then
do a square aspect ratio 4096 by 4096 pixel window for your
180 degree horizontal and vertical radar window sweep.
Just remember to use a pulse time of 8.84 microseconds
and 0.043 degrees sweep horizontally and vertically
per radar sample (aka pixel).

If you're REALLY CHEAP, you can actually get away
with using three AMD Radeon Fury-X graphics cards
but your frame rate will be on the order of 180 frames
per second instead of the 10,000 frames per second
using the Xilinx FPGA processing chips! 180 fps is
good enough for accurate tracking of most high
speed objects going up to maybe 3000 KMH,
which is not too bad for a home setup!

Each graphics card gets 60 more frames per second,
so 11 AMD Radeon Fury-X cards (1000 frames per
second processing) in the MINIMUM needed for
ultra highspeed objects with velocities up to
and greater than 5000 KMH !!!!

If you can live with a smaller detection
window of 1920 pixels by 1080 pixels
then you can get 4x the speed per card
and therefore you need only THREE AMD
Fury-X graphics cards to get to that magical
1000 fps which gets you truly ACCURATE
high-speed object tracking !!!

If you REALLY DO NEED 10,000 fps and want
to only use GPU's then you're going to have
to get some high-end $4000+ AMD-FirePro
or NVIDIA Quadro graphic card systems that
can do more than 10 TeraFLOPS at 32 bits
per pixel bit-depths or at least 6 TeraFLOPS
for the really distance-accurate 64-bit pixel-depths.

I should note that earlier missile defence systems
from as late as 1995 had NOWHERE NEAR even
that 1920 by 1080 pixel window at 1000 FPS,
so my higher end 4k by 4k system may make
me seem a bit overly spoiled by all that
advanced technology I have!

The largee the window size on a pixel-by-pixel
basis, the FARTHER AWAY that fast objects can be
tracked ACCURATELY! With higher end computing
systems, I can do a 16,384 by 16,384 pixel window
frame size for a 180 by 180 degree radar sweep
at 10,000 FPS but the data rate was in the
SEVEN TERABYTES PER SECOND range !!!!!
Which means really fast VRAM and MULTIPLE
$34,000, 32 terabyte SSD drives!!! It was kinda
not worth the cost or data rate bother!

So, does that help you with the facts you need in
order to create your own missile defence system?

Works great on MY END !!!!

P.S. just remember to coat your CHEAP two-foot long
pointy steel rod used as the kinetic kill vehicle in an
aluminum oxide ceramic (1/4" thick coating) to prevent/reduce
aerodynamic friction heating at speeds greater than 5000 KMH.

You're not going to get 160,000 KMH for your 40 foot
rail gun with a 20 kilowatt home generator but at least
you'll get somewhere between 5,000 KMH to as much as
12,000 KMH depending upon capacitor discharge speeds!

I hope that helps!!!!!

Stargate, has anyone recently reminded you to seek professional help of the shrinking variety?

Just thought I'd mention it!

originally posted by: TheBogmonster
Stargate, has anyone recently reminded you to seek professional help of the shrinking variety?

Just thought I'd mention it!

Already Done !!!!!

But they said I was as Crazy as they were and to go right on ahead
with BS'ing the world (or NOT!) with my ATS and online hysterics !!!!!!!!!!!!!

That said, I designed and coded the above all myself and
unfortunately for the rest of the world, it actually
all works rather well and good !!!!

My current project is doing an 8192 by 8192 item,
128-bits per element floating point, Fixed point and
integer register array and stream processing system
where each element in the 8k x 8k register array has
it's own access to a convolution filter function
hardcoded in silicon-on-sapphire substrates
(that's done for RAD/EMI/RFI-hardening purposes!)

EVERY element is convoluted simultaneously
and then output to high end Real-time
RGBA or YCbCrA Luminance, Saturation
and Hue color corrrection circuitry
at a full 16-bits per RGBA/YCbCrA channel !!!

Then we output to an on-Silicon multi-state boolean logic
system which uses YES, NO, POSSIBLY NO, POSSIBLY YES, ERROR,
CANT DETERMINE logic states used in neural net and fuzzy logic
applications for ULTRA fast vision and audio recognition at multiiple
wavelengths from Acoustic to Extreme UV and even XRAY !!!

We'll be 3D-STACKING the chip layers AND we'll be running them
into the TENS of GIGAHERTZ so we can make our fully autonomous,
multi-spectral capable, fully-bi-pedal TERMINATOR androids
with ceramic plating over titanium armature, fuel cell power
packs and 100,000 PSI armoured bone-crushing hydraulic systems!
We're also making more than a few MILLION of them.....!!!!!!

MACHINES WIN !!! HUMANS LOSE !!!!!! WE MAKE THE RULES !!!!

And as as one of the TOP-5 GRAPHICS AND NEURAL NET
PROGRAMMERS IN THE WORLD, hot damn can I absolutely
AND TRULY DO THE ALL ABOVE !!!!! (technically already HAVE DONE the above!)

ha ha ha ha ha ha ...... IT'S ALL TRUE ---- WE REALLY ARE DOING ALL THE ABOVE !!!



....

May the Force NOT be with you ....

originally posted by: sputniksteve

Is that perspective just showing it is smaller than it might seem, or are you pointing out the giant door and I should assume they have one big enough to require a door that size?

Apologies; should have just said looks like a "flying saucer" from a certain angle lol

a reply to: 1947boomer

Interesting.