Marines in Space

Your right mods. I was just responding with equal enthusiasim as the poster I was responding to responded to my little post.

I still think though that a space vehicle to get recon anywhere in the world in 20 hours is brilliant. It will also give the Marine SF guys a edge in the military planning room Delta and SEAL6 won't be getting all of their fun for long if this thing goes the way the Marines want it to work. What Delta you can get there in a day. Thats nice get on the horn and call general mattis and get them recon boys to go kick in osamas door in 1.5 hours. Oh and these guys are recon so tell them that we won't need to be interrogating any prisoners were just neutralising them so don't pack anything for that.

Sriusly how sweet would it be when our marines have space ships!

PS GOOOOOO MODS!

Why not just augment this system DARPAs been working on?

[DARPA plots emergency man-cannon

Launcher to lob SWAT team

You'd think that with global terrorist threats and fighting two wars, the US Defense Department would have little time on its hands to start a circus troupe.

However, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has filed a patent application for a contraption designed to hurl SWAT teams and other emergency workers onto the roofs of inaccessible tall buildings human cannonball style, New Scientist reports.

The lethal-looking device (pictured) consists of a forward-facing chair mounted on rails that point at an angle of up to 80°. Powered by compressed air, the foolhardy “payload” would shoot up until the saddle reaches the end of the rails, at which point he would flail free skyward.

The application is extremely detailed, with proposals for computer control, feedback mechanisms, and valve pneumatics. They don't seem to have considered in as much depth what happens once gravity takes over.

But no matter, the designers reckon a four metre high launcher could put a man on the top of a five storey building in less than two seconds.

awesome, me first!!!



[edit on 8-6-2007 by Stale Cracker]

I uuhhhhhh. ment 2 hours not 20.


Sorry.

Goes back to beating head on wall.

Would this not also just be the natural continuation of the science of travel?

The fact that it will/could be utilized first by a military is of course the norm with any new and exciting technology.

The list of things that we use everyday that were initially used by the military is a long one.

Semper

Makes more sense to keep men up there (in orbit) permanently; doesn't it?
I mean, you need some kind of permanent orbital/sub-orbital platform (maybe nuclear powered, preferably fusion power'd) constantly re-manned to make this kind of thing feasable, don't you? Why launch from planetside all the time? Plus, you get all kinds of nice dough for a permanent orbital/sub-orbital platform, don't you? Kinda like a permanent aircraft carrier in the sky? With marines ready to OP.

Originally posted by liquidself

Makes more sense to keep men up there (in orbit) permanently; doesn't it?

Staying in a weightless environ plays havoc upon our bodies.

Check This site.

Why would we want to have Marines land in a war zone, when they will
have trouble walking ?

Makes no sense, to me.

Lex

yeah I don't recommend having humans floating around in zero gravity environments for any extended duration. Especially buff soldiers who will come back with matchsticks for legs and that icky bicept condition old people get where it dangles below the rest of their arm.

Originally posted by The Vagabond
It's a brilliant and worthwhile idea, chuckle factor or no. Imagine being able to put recon on the ground in 2 hours flat anywhere in the world, regardless of where the carriers are, which bases we have to close or are forbidden by hosts to operate from, etc.

Though being able to put a dozen or so guys on the ground may not seem impressive at a glance, but picture this. We intercept a phone call that lets us know that Bin Laden is leaving a meeting somewhere in the city of Mogadishu, but that's all we know... even if there isn't a single American within a thousand miles, we can have snipers on every highway out of town before he can be gone.

Id love to see the day when we had that capability.

But what ultimate good is it? Would the result ever justify the enormous costs? After all, haven't we been trying to get away from having human bodies put in hostile situations, since more times than not these days they only create possible problems by getting killed or captured, or killing a bunch of schoolkids instead of the bad guys? Nice clean remote-controlled bombs. That's the way to go.

And I'm scratching my poor head to try to come up with a scenario where such insertion would be necessary. Maybe in some kind of James Bond world, where Bond has to fly in from orbit at the last moment to disable the nuclear laser bomb of some mad super villian. Otherwise, where and against whom would this force be projected? A bunch of car bombers in Baghdad? Nothing would ever require that kind of rapid, personal response.

It's cool, but really kind of ridiculous. We already know where bin Laden is, and flying in a bunch of raygun-toting Space Marines isn't going to magically solve any terror problems or political hairballs. We already have plenty of Marines in situations where they don't belong, doing poorly-defined jobs in areas where we're not wanted. And it's already too expensive.

Project JENNIFER? wasn't that the code name for the operation to retreive the K-129 sub from the ocean floor by the Glomar Explorer? Still going on about that one post a page back. sorry.

Originally posted by Unisol
yea baby thats what i was talkin about...some real space capabilities

I have to agree with Unisol. Let's stop this toying with our lives here on this beautiful planet and start making Star Trek Happen.

Oh what could have been

Ithacus

Pretty nasty huh. Vertical envelopment from orbit.

Hey we don't even need a ship for the last part. Man High

Know if we could only build a big enough catapult.

I think this is a really cool idea.

With that said, I think it's a rediculous waste of tax money. With all the bases we have around the world, if we really wanted to be somewhere in 3 hours, we could.

Besides, you're taking all the fun out of the old fashion HALO jump. What fun would it be to have a capsule do all the good stuff.

Read the link I posted in my previous post. Instead of HALO jumps from 30,000 feet we could do it from 300,000 feet. Besides riding the Ithacus down maybe fun enough(does anyone remember the planetary descent scene in Aliens).

YEah I loved the drop ship from aliens. That thing was so menacing looking when it unfurled it's missiles n stuff. BLew up pretty nice too.

We can do super high halo drops. one test pilot had the joy of testing the new parachute design intended for ultra high flying planes like the U2 and SR-71. he wore a nasa space suite, sat in a weather balloon and accended to like 120,000 feet and then jumped out. there is footage of it on the discovery channel they did a show about it. It's pretty cool because there was no drag because the air was so thin there was no terminal velocity. he got up to like 700 MPH and actually broke the sound barrier although I think he was too high up at the time for it to actually create a sonic boom due to the air being so thin and the realistic speed of sound much higher. but he technically went mach according to sea level speeds. although he was at like 60,000 feet when it happened. the shute deployed fine.

BASS,
Take a look at This

And, I still think having military ground troops in orbit is a bad idea.

Regards,
Lex

Hi all new here but this topic really is interesting to me. I just got done reading one of Dale Browns new books. It is called Strike Force. If anyone has read his books you know he was formerly in the Air Force and now writes fiction usually talking about weapon systems in the books that are almost always plausible real world systems.

Well to why i posted. His newest book talks about a weapon system exactly like this a LOE transport that could deliver a small group of soldiers anywhere in the world in around 2hrs. I find his books interesting because though they are works of fiction much of what he writes about is based in some part on real world systems.

Dale Brown Wikipedia Page
Link to some info on the author if anyone is interested the books are good reads imo

nope all my military reading is old school marcinko.


Hey lex. I'm going to check out your link you usually have something spot on to say. Personally I am against random militarization. Humans should focus on peacful constructive applications.

Here's an article from the newest issue of Popular Science about actually deploying from space not in a dropship but something like Starship Troopers.

www.popsci.com...