Now Zombie Runs are the popular thing in the 5K world. All over the place you see these fun runs where particpants skedaddle away from the shambling dead. What is different about one in Athens Alabama is that it is being sponsored by the 1343rd Chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear defense (often abbreviated to CBRN defense or CBRN) company– the type of unit that would be on the front line of any zombie outbreak.
Back in 2007, the US Navy started looking at high-energy lasers for use as an active weapon. The most promising of these, the Laser Weapons System (LaWS) has already downed target aircraft and is on the way to the fleet.
(The LaWS prototype aboard the USS Dewey in 2012)
The LaWS uses series of six commercially available 5.4-kW fiber lasers focused through a frequency doubling crystal. This active laser system can fire a very tight 32kW beam at line of sight ranges than can travel in excess of 10-miles on a clear day. The typical commercially availible red laser pointer is about 1 milliwatts and is advertised to be able to damage your retinas if you stare into it. This laser is 32-kW, which means that it is 32,000,000-times more powerful than the thing you chase your cat around the house with. It costs some $32-million to develop, which may seem like a lot but when compared to such high-tech weapons as the multi-billion dollar F-35, it’s a comparative bargain.
How effective is it?
In a recent test aboard the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Dewey last summer the LaWS prototype downed a BQM-147A target UAV drone. This weapon, when fielded will be able to shoot down slow moving aircraft, such as UAVs and helicopters, as well as be able to engage small boats and possibly even targets ashore. Its beam does not have to destroy the target if not required. It can simply damage it, blind its sensors, or in the place of a small boat, kill its engine and leave it dead in the water.
Warning shots
If just a small portion of the laser energy is used, rather than a full power blast, an intense and visible beam can be projected to significant ranges to provide a clear and unmistakable warning that a potential target is about to be zapped unless an immediate change in their behavior is observed. This feature could also be used as a laser dazzler, a sort of less-lethal weapon, to disorient and warn away the crew of an aircraft or ship. In short the LaWS could be used to ‘flash’ an approaching unidentified craft at long distances, in the hope that a little bit of eye irritation could result in saving lives on both sides. While the 1995 United Nations Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons bans weapons designed to cause permanent blindness, the use of the LaWS in this sense could be examined if it could be turned down enough to not cause permanent damage.
A test video of the LaWS in action, shooting down a remotely piloted UAV drone. Pretty dramatic footage. From the Navy’s website: “120804-N-ZZ999-001 SAN DIEGO, Calif. (Jul. 30, 2012) the Laser Weapon System (LaWS) temporarily installed aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Dewey (DDG 105) (shown here conducting an operational test) in San Diego, Calif., is a technology demonstrator built by the Naval Sea Systems Command from commercial fiber solid state lasers, utilizing combination methods developed at the Naval Research Laboratory. LaWS can be directed onto targets from the radar track obtained from a MK 15 Phalanx Close-In Weapon system or other targeting source. The Office of Naval Research’s Solid State Laser (SSL) portfolio includes LaWS development and upgrades providing a quick reaction capability for the fleet with an affordable SSL weapon prototype. This capability provides Navy ships a method for Sailors to easily defeat small boat threats and aerial targets without using bullets. (U.S. Navy video by Office of Naval Research/ Released)”
Smoke one UAV
Costs $1 per shot
According to the Navy, the LaWS can fire a full-power burst that costs less than $1 per session. By comparison a SM-2MR surface to air missile, the Navy’s standard plane and missile killer for the past thirty years, costs about $400,000 a pop. Even smaller close in point defense type missiles such as the RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM) can run over $700K apiece. Further, whereas the number of missiles, shells, and bullets carried by a ship is always finite, as long as the ship’s engineering department can produce power, the LaWS can be fired.
This beast is the old 1989-era Sea Lite Beam Director, the Navy’s first active high-energy laser. Well, the USN has now figured out how to shrink this down to package that is more pallet-sized than supersized.
How will it look when it is adopted?
LaWS will deploy on the Persian Gulf next year on the USS Ponce. The Ponce is a nearly 50-year old former amphibious warfare ship that had been converted to an Afloat Forward Staging Base inthe Persian Gulf. An experimental Ord-Alt’ed CIWS on the Ponce is expected to carry the system sometime after October 2013.
The current US Navy’s Phalanx MK15 Close In Weapons System (CIWS) fires a high-speed computer controlled radar guided 20mm Gatling gun at over 4500-rounds per minute. It’s expected that the Navy will add the LaWS laser to this already cutting-edge gun after 2016.
(The red ‘can’ on the side of the CIWS is the LaWS laser…coming to the fleet at least in experimental form as early as this year)
The Navy is intending to add this system to the more than 250 CIWS Phalanx mounts found through the fleet. These devices are the familiar R2D2-looking systems that marry a small radar, fire-control system, and 20mm Vulcan cannon to track targets out to 10 miles away and destroy them once they are within 2.2-miles with accurate gunfire. The addition of the LaWS laser to this will allow the CIWS to engage threats first with the laser then with the 20mm Vulcan if needed.
This combined laser/gun mount, after testing and acceptance will be known as the CIWS Mk 15 Mod 41 with production and fielding in the fleet by 2017.
The great Tom Knapp, perhaps one of the greatest exhibition shooters of all time, has passed away at age 62. He was an ambassador for the sport and just a legend in the gun community.
Tom doing some trick shooting and crediting it all to the Benelli. It is like a magician crediting the hat for the rabbit. Rest in peace Mr. Knapp. Millions of clays (and a few golfballs and balloons) are sleeping easier this week.
Check out http://fallingfruit.org/ It lists urban edibles such as fruit and nut trees along sidewalks and parks, overly large populations of squirrel, and other interesting information. “Foraging in the 21st century is an opportunity for urban exploration, to fight the scourge of stained sidewalks, and to reconnect with the botanical origins of food… ” The map has more than 6,700 crowd-sourced entries so far.
Free food bitches!
Photo from fallen fruit’s website shows a urban gatherer that collected 500lbs of apples off of publicly available trees
Today everything is tactical. I mean you have tactical bacon, tactical umbrellas, tactical pens and even tactical kilts. Well back in the 1970s, when shotguns were either pump or semi-auto and they all had wood stocks, one company introduced one of the most classic combat shotguns of all time.
In the late 1970s, the Brescia, Italy-based firearms legacy of Luigi Franchi S.p.A. was still owned by the same family that started it back in 1868. After flirting with a number of failed submachine gun and carbine designs for the military market in the 1950s, the firearms firm had settled into the commercial shotgun niche with their Black Magic series autoloaders (still imported to the US by Benelli as the 48AL) and the Aristocrat series of over and under shotguns. With a 30-year itch coming on to offer a military design once more, Franchi redirected its experience in making some of the best scatterguns around to designing a combat shotgun. This gun was the SPAS12.
When you leave the house and go about your daily travels, are you armed? If so, with what? Do you vary multiple weapons, and if so, do you carry more than one firearm? Let us look at that.Putting your eggs all in one basket– or for the subject of this article, trusting your life and those around you to one imperfect gadget, is borderline foolhardy. Yes, you may have a super tactical top-of-the-line CCW handgun that you have practiced with for a decade and trust implicitly, but it could still fail. It can be stripped away. It could be forced out of battery by a scenario that you never conceived of. Your magazine could go one way and your gun could go the other. A million things can happen.
Armand Larive Middle School had what is perhaps the greatest junior high social studies class ever: Zombie Survival Skills. But the killjoy parents and administrators put the kibosh on the post-apocalyptic class, feeling that undead studies were not appropriate for growing minds….http://io9.com/oregon-school-cancels-zombie-survival-classes-ensures-458591332
Did O.F. Mossberg and sons ever make a pistol? When someone says the word ‘Mossberg’ most gun enthusiasts say, “shotgun” and leave it at that. Folks in the know usually then pipe up and inform the short sighted that for decades and still the company has made rifles. But then there is that one guy who just smirks because he remembers that yes, Mossberg did make a pistol a long time ago and it’s name was indicative of its stature—the Brownie.
Swedish immigrant Oscar Frederick Mossberg came to the US in the 1880s from Europe. Once here, he found work with the Fitchburg, Massachusetts based bicycle company, operated by fellow Scandinavian immigrant Iver Johnson. The two would work together not only on velocipedes but also revolvers.
When Mossberg left Iver Johnson, he went on to manage the small factory of the C.S. Shattuck Arms Co. in nearby Hatfield, Massachusetts. From there he went to work for Stevens and finally for New Haven, Connecticut based Marlin-Rockwell. In 1919 when Marlin Rockwell went belly up (they primarily made machineguns and WWI had just ended), the unemployed 53-year old OF Mossberg, and his two sons started a new firearms company of their own, And they did it with the Brownie as thier first product.
Dying of wounds just a week before the end of hostilities in Europe, Kurt Knispel was rolled into a mass grave with 15 other German war dead behind a church wall in Vrbovec. He had fought in every type of German tank as a loader, a gunner and a commander – received a fatal wound just ten days before the end of the war. At age 23, the highest scoring tank ace of WWII – Kurt Knispel – was dead.This village in the South Moravian Region of what is today the Czech Republic, was the front line of the Eastern front in April 1945. However it was just a hundred miles from Kurt’s home. And his body has just been found and identified by his dog tags.
When his country was absorbed by Germany in 1938, Sudeten Czech Kurt Knispel soon found himself in the German Army. Attached to 1st Company of the 503rd Heavy Panzer Battalion, he became one of the highest scoring tank aces of World War II with a total of 168 confirmed tank kills. The actual number, although unconfirmed, may be as high as 195 as he killed several tanks that he did not claim, and whenever a kill was disputed he backed away. He is counted with Johannes Bölter, Ernst Barkmann, Otto Carius and Michael Wittmann as being one of the, if not the, greatest tank ace of all time.
Kurt was a hero on both sides of the panzer though. He had several conflicts with higher Nazi authorities (for instance, he assaulted an Einsatzgruppen officer whom he saw mistreating Soviet POWs) and general lack of military bearing, sporting a goatee and hair longer than regulations.
Only his impressive track-record saved him from ending up in a military prison. This is thought to have kept him (though he was recommended for it four times) from winning the coveted Knight’s Cross, a standard award for most other World War II German panzer aces.
He is to be re-interred in a military cemetery in Brno, Czech Republic.
If every gun tells a story, the FBI’s reference firearms collection could fill a very, very large book. The inventory of more than 7,000 firearms—curated over 80 years—contains just about every make and model, from John Dillinger’s Prohibition-era revolver to the modern battlefield’s M16, and almost everything in between. More here:
