In the comments of my post the other day comparing electrical and firearm energy levels, commenter "hagmanti" was delighted to be informed that the blast of flame coming out of a rail-gun's barrel...
...which makes it look more like a normal chemical firearm than most normal chemical firearms do, is vapourised rail and projectile material.
This is a serious problem for both military and... hobbyist... railguns. Damage to the projectile is not that big a deal as long as you're only firing "kinetic kill" lumps of metal, not explosive-filled shells. But a gun that needs to be torn down and have major components replaced every few shots is not a practical weapon.
There are actually analogous problems with a lot of other unreasonably powerful guns. Truly monstrous artillery like railway guns (often, confusingly, also referred to as "rail guns") could fire only a few hundred rounds - even with WWII technology - before the whole huge barrel had to be replaced.
At least one of those railway guns, the World-War-One Paris Gun, had a series of shells of gradually increasing size to be shot in order, so the bullet always fit the barrel.
The same thing happens to small arms. A frequently-used rifle barrel will eventually be "shot out" and lose projectile velocity and accuracy, as the bullet bounces down the worn tube. It just happens a lot faster if you perversely insist on 120 million joules, or around 1.7 billion joules, of muzzle energy, for the Paris Gun and...
In their later life those mere 16-inchers became rather more destructive than any of the railway guns, though, on account of how they could toss fifteen to twenty kilotons of instant sunshine at the enemy.
And then there's the multi-chamber gun concept, where the initial propellant charge behind the shell is relatively small, and the barrel has branches containing subsidiary charges that are timed to go off after the shell has passed them. This design lets you have very high muzzle velocity without beating up the barrel, or the shell, with a single immense propellant explosion; multi-chamber guns could be used to launchsatellites, as well as to kill people. But nobody's ever really gotten them to work, which is, I think, in mostcases just as well.
I'm a bit disappointed in the recent semi-rebooted gritty James Bond movies.
They're good films, and they're far better than the burgeoning silliness of the last of the old run of movies (...an invisible car? Really?). But a lot of that silliness was just misapplication of one of the hallmarks of the classic Bond movies: Gadgets.
The gadgets played a large role in making Bond films what they were, but they sort of stayed phase-locked in the Seventies. Bond might have been remote-controlling his BMW [shudder] with a Nokia or something, but the Third Doctor had a frickin' remote-controlled car in 1971. Bond didn't even have a gadget with a cutting laser on it until 1983.
If you're going to have Bond gadgets again beyond the low-key stuff in the rebooted films, you have to make them truly impressive. Not something, like an invisible car, that could have been dreamed up in 1970 as easily as 2002.
This is the secretest of secret agents going on the most important missions ever, after all. He should be kitted out with and backed up by with the very best superblack reverse-engineered-from-crashed-flying-saucers ultra-technology that can be created by the distinguished successors to Bletchley Park (and all the other people whose discoveries went into Tizard's briefcase).
So, say:
Bond has been shepherded into a lift by Q, and they descend. For a rather long time.
On the way down, Q explains that MI6 and, ah, some higher-numbered agencies, rather suspect that certain developments in mechanical augmentation of human strength, for military and industrial purposes, may have fallen into the wrong hands.
And that there is no real reason for these systems to be limited to only a man-sized exoskeleton, or indeed for constructors to tolerate the weakness of a normal human body within it, if one is willing to take certain rather drastic steps to ameliorate this problem.
And that Her Majesty's Secret Services have been working on their own systems to combat this threat, but have faced certain ethical obstacles.
The lift doors open to reveal a warehouse-like space, harshly illuminated by overhead fluorescents, and dotted with computer installations, machine tools, and agglomerations of technology of unclear purpose.
The giant room is dominated, however, by a looming object in its centre. A mad profusion of cables and pipes and screens and scaffolding and catwalks surrounds, and obscures, a metallic shape about the size of a terrace house.
Q turns to Bond, and says, "For this project to succeed, 007, we needed someone with great familiarity with our most advanced systems; otherwise the training process would be impossibly difficult. There were several candidates, but owing to the... the nature of the project, none were acceptable."
"Pardon?"
"Well, not to put too fine a point on it, we needed their brain, and about six inches of spinal cord, which is rather-"
"You needed...?!"
"Which is, is of course, more than we were prepared to ask any servant of the Queen to volunteer. But then-"
"What the hell are you-"
"But then, the previous Q had, well, he had a car accident. And, fortuitously..."
He waves vaguely at the huge shape in the middle of that mass of pipes and cables.
With a subsonic hum, the shape changes.
It stands up.
Many of the cables and pipes drop away, as the giant machine takes a step forward. The concrete floor trembles noticeably as its foot comes down.
So is the GravityLight a sensible design that conforms to the laws of physics, or is it also powered by Pixie Dust?
Lee
There's nothing inherently wrong with the basic idea of converting the energy of a falling mass into electricity. (That's how hydoelectric power stations work, after all.) It may even be possible to do it quite efficiently, and cheaply, on a small scale now.
In the olden days you would have needed to gear up your dynamo a lot from the pulley your falling weight (or flow of stream water) was turning, but today super-powerful magnets are very cheap and so efficient lower-speed dynamos are easier to make. Especially if you're only trying to light one high-intensity LED to a brightness that'll let someone read a book at close range.
The GravityLight peopleclaim thirty minutes of light per lift of the weight, and the tape connecting the weight to the light looks to be, being generous, about 1.5 metres long. They don't say exactly what the weight is, but they do say you can fill the GravityLight weight bag...
...with use "anything weighing about 20lbs"; let's again be generous and say you get ten kilos of stuff in there, which is a perfectly liftable weight for a wide range of humans.
So we've got ten kilograms falling 1.5 metres in standard gravitation; that gives us a maximum of 147 joules to play with.
Split over thirty minutes, which is 1800 seconds, that gives us only 0.082 joules per second. That means a power of 0.082 watts, or 82 milliwatts.
A single standard white LED will have spec-sheet power numbers of about 20 milliamps at 3.6 volts, which is 72 milliwatts. It'll work fine - and more efficiently - at rather lower current, though, which is just as well because this falling-weight system is certain to be a long way short of 100% efficient at turning the weight's gravitational potential energy into light.
Even if it's only 50% efficient, though, you've still got 36 milliwatts to play with, which is plenty to light one LED to a useful, though far from room-filling, brightness. Even if you pare off some of the above generous assumptions about weight and fall distance, you'll still be easily above 20 milliwatts, which is also usefully bright.
The GravityLight people say their invention is intended to replace kerosene lanterns, but it's definitely not going to have the room-filling brightness of a kerosene lamp with the wick turned well up. Given the numerous downsides of kerosene lighting, though, and the fact that a lot of poor people probably don't turn their lamps up to max very often, a GravityLight or two could well replace one.
The ridiculous Gravia concept thing had a heavier weight falling a similar distance, for a total of about 271 joules. But the designer idiotically claimed that the thing would have the light output of a forty-watt incandescent bulb for four hours. This was so impossible that it couldn't come anywhere near being done even in Physics Experiment Land, with a perfectly efficient dynamo and a perfectly efficient lamp.
With real-world hardware, in contrast, the GravityLight can work. I'm not totally convinced that for household lighting you wouldn't be better off with a couple of conductive objects a reasonable distance from each other in the galvanic series, some damp earth as an eletrolyte, and a Joule Thief to boost the output to run an LED. That sort of improvised battery can run for a very long time at the very low power a Joule-Thiefed LED requires, and its poor portability doesn't matter if you're using it as a hoursehold light (and is an advantage if you want to avoid your light being stolen...).
But the physics, at least, checks out for the GravityLight.
I've read that the problem with ray guns is that as an energy delivery system, pieces of high-speed lead propelled by a chemical reaction work much better than photons propelled by battery power.
If you could dump all of the energy out of, say, a AA battery really fast, though, could you get bullet levels of energy out of each battery?
S.C.
Yes, you could.
Let's presume you're using nickel-metal-hydride AA batteries, which are somewhere between average-rifle-cartridge and average-pistol-cartridge in size. You can get a lot more current out of a NiMH or NiCd rechargeable than an alkaline or carbon-zinc battery, but, as you say, you still can't discharge them nearly fast enough for them to be useful replacements for firearm cartridges.
Even if you don't care whether the battery survives the experience, the biggest bang you can get out of a battery is the feeble "explosion" of a laptop battery. That may give you nasty burns if it happens literally on your lap, and shorted batteries have been responsible for the destruction of quite a few cargo planes, but batteries are no more than firecrackers compared with proper explosive devices.
Never mind that for now, though, let's just look at the energy content.
The most generally useful kind of NiMH cell is the "low self-discharge" type, which unlike the older kind of NiMH, do not go flat in a matter of weeks whether you use them or not. (Low-self-discharge cells are often sold as "pre-charged", or "ready to use".) LSD cells have lower capacity, though, so let's say we're using non-LSD cells with the absolute bleeding edge maximum capacity today available, which is about three amp-hours (3000 milliamp-hours).
1.2 volts (the standard NiMH or NiCd terminal voltage) times three amp-hours gives 3.6 watt-hours. A joule is a watt-second, there are 3600 seconds in an hour, so 3.6 watt-hours is 12,960 joules.
Firearm muzzle energy is often measured in foot-pounds, not joules, but I'll keep it all in SI units here. You also couldn't get the entire capacity of any electrical energy source into your beam or projectile, because no laser or mass-driver is 100% efficient, but I'll handwave that as well.
12,960 joules is a pretty darn respectable chunk of energy, way more than any handgun cartridge can manage. 9mm rounds top out around 500 joules of muzzle energy, .44 Magnum is a couple of thousand joules at most, and even the ludicrous .500 S&W Magnum is only around 4000 joules.
Rifle cartridges that qualify as "high-powered" seldom exceed 4000 joules. You have to start looking at exotic specialised sniper and large-game rounds, or heavy-machine-gun ammunition, before you get above ten thousand joules. The .50 BMG round easily beats 12,000 joules, and the more ludicrous kinds of elephant-gun double rifleroughlyequal the battery's energy...
...as you'd bleeding well want them to, for this kind of recoil punishment.
But all of this is, again, just fantasy, because you can't dump the energy out of any kind of battery anywhere near fast enough to make it useful in a gun.
You can, however, dump the energy out of a capacitor in a very short period of time.
The highest-capacity "supercapacitors" can't be discharged in a tiny fraction of a second without damaging them; they're usable in a flashlight or for regenerative braking, but not for one lightning-strike discharge, as in a firearm.
Normal caps certainly can be discharged fast, though.
This cap bank could be used to power some kind of kinetic or ray-gun weapon - but it takes all of those huge beer-can capacitors to hold a mere 11.3 kilojoules, roughly the same as our one AA NiMH cell. The one killing the watermelon above is only 9270 joules, and its caps are huge.
I have one beer-can electrolytic cap of my own; it featured in this...
If it still had its full original capacity - which it doesn't - then fully charged to its 850-microfarad, 450-volt redline, it would hold 86 joules of energy.
Chemical lasers can be usefully powerful without requiring capacitor banks the size of a house. They are generally very unpleasant to be near, though, because they either run on, or produce, horrible toxic compounds.
Which is why plain old deflagratinggunpowder, propelling a piece of metal down a tube, remains the standard way to do unto others at a distance.
Oh - and if you've never watched Kaboom!, you really ought to.
UPDATE: On the subject of ludicrous electrical things, there's this piece I did on what a AAA battery composed of nothing but electrons would be like.
Given the recent plague of idiots who start a game of MechWarrior Online and immediately overheat themselves to death in return (I think) for the basic reward you get, win or lose, I have as previously mentioned been e-mailing the names of those players to support@mwomercs.com.
When the same dude showed up again, I sent another report, the text often just:
"NameOfDickhead", again.
I was pretty sure they wanted players to do this. They certainly haven't told us not to, to my knowledge.
Except for me, just now.
> Dan
>
> Nov 30 01:17 (PST)
>
> "CHIEOKURE NO KO", again, AND "skSniper", YET again. Both on my team
> in one game.
>
> You have told me, TWICE, that my suicide reports for "skSniper" have
> been "solved" - ticket numbers #56050 and #56059.
>
> This is apparently some strange definition of the word "solved" that
> I have not previously encountered.
Hello Dan,
This is Game Master Destined. I am one of the Game Masters addressing the Reported Players tickets, and all of the processed tickets go through me personally for filing and logging. I would like to clarify some information for you:
It is not our policy to disclose disciplinary actions taken against another user. This is the reason your tickets are marked as "solved" - because the report has been logged, investigated (fully) and we have moved on to the next tickets. I've noticed that you have an exorbitant amount of tickets (36, at this point in time), many of which are player reports and duplicate player reports - we are at the point now that I have to ask you to stop submitting tickets. We are aware of the situation, we have addressed it on the forums, and are taking actions against players as we speak. It takes time to investigate each report as we must go through logs and make a proper audit trail, contact the players, etc... and the more tickets we have to process, the longer it takes to build a report about each user.
Understand that, by submitting a ticket about a player, you are in no way guaranteeing that the actions you wish to be taken will be taken. We decide as a group of game masters and community representatives what should be done, and do not proceed without proof of grievances. Let me give you again the text we have been responding to you with:
"We will follow-up on this privately, thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Please note that, by receiving this notification, we are acknowledging your report and have started an investigation into the situation. Unless we have any further questions regarding your report, we require no other correspondence with you on this matter."
This is pretty clear to me. Every time you send us another ticket, you are slowing us down. I will be solving all of your tickets after logging them in our system. If you continue to contact us on this matter, I will consider it harassment and be forced to suspend your account.
This issue is now considered to be closed, and no further correspondence will be necessary on your part. Thank you for your understanding.
I have thus far given the MechWarrior Onlinepeople quite a lot more money, for this less-than-perfect beta, than I would have paid for a AAA retail game. I firmly intend to give them even more, if I run out of my current "Mech Credits".
I suggested to "Destined" that they might like to make more clear, via perhaps an official news post, what they want players to do and what they do not want them to do. And to be perhaps a little less ready to threaten to ban players who are only trying to help.
I shan't say much more here, because I fear I may say something intemperate, and get myself banned. Then I would be $US95.85 in the hole, not to mention all that time spent levelling up 'Mechs, and time spent promoting the game via near-obsessive blog posts to my not-insubstantial readership, and time spent reporting the abovementioned bad players.
In that case I would certainly never come back to the game, and I'd strongly advise anybody else to go with Hawken or Living Legends or even World of Tanks instead. Should you try MWO anyway, I would, if banned, certainly not advise you to buy any Mech Credits, lest this happen to you too.
And now, I'm going to get drunk and play some more MWO.
One is the standard lame Streak Commando with three SSRM-2s and no other weapons. It gets kills.
One is slighly less cheesy, with two Streak-2s and two Small Lasers. It gets kills too, and doesn't become harmless when the missiles run out.
The third, by far the fastest, has an Anti-Missile System and two Small Pulse Lasers. It never kills anyone. It floats like a butterfly and stings like one too.
So no shit, there I was, in Frozen City, doing figure-8s around a Catapult and a Cataphract. I was poking them gently with my two tiny guns and preventing them from getting anything more useful done.
One of them blew my leg off.
What that does in MechWarrior Online at the moment is not actually cause your 'Mech's leg to fly off, and not even cause you to fall down, because knockdown was taken out of the game when they launched the open beta, having caused too many problems with 'Mechs getting back up in places strangely distant from where they fell over.
Rather, losing a leg just drops your speed to zero, and restricts your top speed - I think very severely if all of the leg's internal structure is gone, and by less if some of it remains.
My Commando was suffering the lowest level of speed-reduction, which only halves your speed - meaning I could actually still do 67 kilometres per hour once I accelerated again.
That's not what happens when a light 'Mech gets "legged", though. What happens is, other 'Mechs take advantage of its sudden immobility to hit it with everything they've got, blowing off the other leg and thereby killing it, or just killing by demolishing some other important component, like the engine or cockpit.
Not going to go down without a fight, I whipped the crosshair around to the exact middle of the Catapult's body, and fired one Small Pulse Laser shot.
The Catapult is sort of Marauder-shaped; its cockpit is at the front of its vaguely egg-ish body.
Critical hit to cockpit. Shower of sparks, Catapult dead.
Not believing my luck, I whipped around the other way and shot the Cataphract right in the middle of his body.
The Cataphract has more of a standard biped layout; its cockpit is not in the middle of its body.
The middle of its body is the centre-torso location, behind which is the engine.
This guy's centre-torso armour was already gone.
Critical hit to engine. Shower of sparks, Cataphract dead.
Other people took a while to finish off the last enemy Atlas, everybody being slightly distracted by quite a lot of chat conversation about WTF just happened, and whether or not this qualified me to be King of Israel.
When I came out of the game and my 'Mech was repaired, my bank balance started with "1337"
Here's some more of the No Guts No GalaxyMechWarrior Online team, including the inimitable BB Wolfe... who sometimes phones it in just a little bit.
I have played a lot of MechWarrior Online. I'm currently getting to Master in both Commandos and Atlases, which may be a diagnosable disorder.
My USB hamburger pedal no longer macro-types "Please stick together, or we will die." Even pick-up game groups are pretty good at sticking together now. Instead, it says "Report this to support@mwomercs.com.", because of all the fun I and other players have had with "skSniper" or "Duke Nukem" or "Titanstahl", to name just a few of the more famous heat-suiciders.
When you start a game with one or if you're especially lucky two of those guys, they will commit suicide by overheating in the first 30 seconds of the game. Apparently you still get a participation reward or something, at the end of the match, for doing this. Or they've just left their bots running to do this automatically and haven't noticed that they're not making any money any more.
Either way, all you can do about it at this point, besides harsh language in chat, is report the offender to support@mwomercs.com, with a screenshot if you're especially diligent. The developers' banhammer appears to be rather inflatable and squeaky, but this game is still a beta, so I'm not especially cross about it.
There are also "AFK farmers", who don't commit suicide, but don't do anything else, either. Again, there are some players who are famous for this, but random people do it as well. Since they may be away for a perfectly kosher reason like changing a nappy or answering the phone, you shouldn't report them unless you see them do it over and over.
(In my 2-ER PPCAtlas, which is something of a challenge to operate with Australian ping times, I once deliberately shot a guy on my own team in the back. I did this because he would not stop shooting at the last away-from-keyboard baddie, while we were trying to capture the enemy base, for larger rewards. It worked; he turned around and shot at me instead, and a few seconds later we got a cap win. And, with any luck, he was Enlightened.)
As far as other normal beta problems go - crashes and other weirdness that make the game unplayable - MechWarrior Online is pretty darn good. Crash-to-desktops happen, but not very often; in each 16-player match it's not unusual to see one person disconnect randomly, but it doesn't happen all the time.
Other show-stopping bugs are really rare. The dreaded 4-frame-per-second problem does still come up, but I think I've gone at least fifty games between incidents of it. (What exactly the problem is, I'm not sure. If you look away from the middle of the map and other 'Mechs, you get full frame rate; turn back and everything goes to hell. Restarting the game always fixes it, for me at least.)
There was also one start where my screen was stuck in the pale yellow-orange startup-effect colour with no heads-up displays working. I've heard others complain about that too, but it's only happened to me once. And one other time I started and got normal colours, but no map or other displays, and my torso was stuck in the maximum-left position.
But generally speaking, the game works. And the farming/griefing dickheads haven't ruined it, though they really are trying.
If you've not given MechWarrior Online a go, and you have a Windows PC [EDIT: Per comment below, a Windows 7 or later PC], try it out. You really can play, and play well, without paying a penny.
