They have been seen in science fiction for a hundred years and go by many names, heat rays, death rays, lasers, masers, phasers, disrupters and e-bombs, but they are all effectively directed energy weapons and in theory they could be the ideal weapon that works at near the speed of …
F-35, Why is it the Best Fighter in the World Today?
To say that the F-35 project has come in for lot of bad press over the years is bit of an understatement with any number of critics and armchair pilots pitching in on every little piece of bad news that percolates through the internet. But with the aircraft now being …
What happened to the Trans Europe Express? – The TEE
The Trans Europe Express was the first international railway service to link up major cities in western Europe with high-speed trains, crossing borders with minimal stops and disruption and allowing business people and wealthy travellers to travel from one country to another and back again within a single day. All …
Focke-Wulf FW-190 vs P-51 Mustang – Which was better?
They are seen by many as two of the finest fighter planes of world war 2 and yet both had rather inauspicious beginnings but through upgrades, both large and small they became formidable fighting machines that were feared and admired by both sides but how did the Focke-wolf FW-190 stack …
Hypersonic Missiles vs ICBM’s – Which is better?
Over the last 60 years or so, intercontinental Ballistic missiles or ICBM’s have become the ultimate deterrent in the defence arsenals of the US, UK, Russia, China, France and other countries. This produced the doctrine of M.A.D or Mutually Assured Destruction where if there was a nuclear conflict, no one …
Will NASA’s Asteroid mission save us in the future? – Project DART
“It’s a 100 per cent certainty we’ll be hit by a devastating asteroid, but we’re not 100 per cent sure when.” That was a statement from the B612 Foundation in April 2018. Now with all our energies seemingly focused on the current biological threat we shouldn’t forget that there are …
How do you Protect Spacecraft from the Radiation of Space?
Although we dream colonising the moon, travelling around the solar system and one day beyond to the stars, space is a dangerous place and not least because of the radiation from our sun and galactic cosmic rays. We only found out about the bands of trapped ionising radiation that surround …
How does Coronavirus (Covid-19) compare to Spanish flu?
There is a saying that goes along the lines of, “the man that looks to the past and future is blind in one eye but the man that looks the future only is blind in both”. Although this is something which we should heed at all times, in the case …
Nuking the moon – The Secret USAF Project A119
Probably one of the most inspirational moments in human history was the landing on the moon by Apollo 11 and Niel Armstrong’s first steps on the surface but maybe if project A119 had gone ahead almost 10 years earlier, things might not have looked quite so rosy knowing that the …
Hypernovas & Magnetars – The Most Powerful Objects in the Universe
As we scurry around the surface of our planet doing all the things that we think are so important, we rarely think how lucky we are to living not only in a fairly benign and stable point in the earth’s lifetime but also in the life of our nearest star, …