A laser that is powerful enough to hurt a human target (especially a human target with body armor) is going to be powerful enough that it'll be ionizing the air to some degree. It'll be like a lightning bolt, there'll be flashes of light and sharp cracking sounds. That's also ignoring the fact that the random bits of terrain that the laser is hitting will also be exploding. Someone under "suppressing fire" from a laser weapon would be quite aware of the fact.
All that said, the successful laser weapons right now seem to all be anti drone/aircraft and they are typically using tracked CW (not pulsed) lasers with heating over time to avoid atmospheric lensing. Lots of challenges to overcome in getting pulsed energy a long way through air.
I was wondering if we’d see pulsed lasers in anti-drone warfare… the power supply advantages aside, focusing on just the right point in time with the pulse seems hard.
It might be hard, but with the processing power we can fit into microchips these days I’d say we fixed harder problems already. I mean, the controller needs at least two cameras or another methode of locating the target and estimating the distance, but I’d guess we could completely get rid of time of flight calculations as the light pulse would be instant for that matter.
The hard part is predicting atmospheric effects to get the focus right. It’s basically impossible without some form of just in time compensation. One idea I’ve seen is that you fire a physical projectile and use that to calibrate the focal point at arbitrary distance, almost like a laser tracer.
It’s not easy but you can correct the atmosphere. This is done with guide stars and adaptive optics.
The bigger challenge is that for intense pulsed lasers, the standard laser profile causes them to self focus in air through nonlinear effects. To overcome this you need to make weird profiles like top hats that are much hard to get just right.
This is a fundamentally physical limitation that is pretty tricky to overcome.
That’s what I find insane. It’s like people have lost the ability to say, “what Israel is/was doing was fucked, but also fuck Hamas for mass murder and rape”. People get upset when you say, “I feel bad for the Israelis and Palestinians”. You’re either pro-hamas, anti-israel or pro-israel, anti-hamas. You’re either pro-palestine and anti-israel, or anti-palestine and pro-israel.
You know you can be sympathetic to the civilians on both sides and hate the extremists right?
Yeah, it's one of those polarizing issues, where people on both sides decide that any opinion is binary and you either are all in for Israel or all in for Palestina and you can't have any empathy or understanding for both sides.
These past days people yelled at me in the fediverse that I chill for Israel's illegal occuption and also that I chill for Hamas and blame their atrocities on Israel. It's insane. You can hardly have any other opinion than either Israel all bad or Palestine all bad.
It's disgusting how many people on both sides support slaughtering civilians of the other side while at the same time saying that the other side are monsters for slaughtering civilians.
Welcome to modern politics, where the range of opinions that a person accepts is so small that it doesn’t overlap with the range that a person on the other side accepts.
If you have an opinion in the middle, everyone will just hate you and having a discussion is impossible.
I blame Western media’s fairness bias. Decades of pushing the idea that every issue has exactly two sides, no more and no less, and those sides are exactly opposite each other and fully equal.
Israel, represented by their hardline zionist governments, on one side. Palestine, represented by the hardline islamists of Hamas, on the other. Nothing exists off that axis, nothing exists between those poles but Enlightened Centrist fence sitters. Fairness.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken on symbolic importance to many people. In one sense whatever is going on there is not really important for most of the world. It’s some kind of internal conflict/civil war with essentially neighbors beating each other up. But it doesn’t really affect anyone else significantly. And yet everyone has a take on who is right and who is wrong and the thinking is very black and white and absolutist, even if you really don’t know what’s going on or the history behind it or the stakes.
Contrast this with other similar conflicts that most people have no opinion on. Like Ethiopia-Tigray or the ongoing civil war in Myanmar. Most people probably haven’t even heard of this stuff and have no clue as to who is fighting who. Hell, how many people had the barest inkling of who Hamas was a week ago. And now they feel they can take some absolute morally superior position on the issue.
It’s because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become symbolic of who you are. The other conflicts I mentioned have no symbolic meaning or importance to people outside those regions. The Ukraine war is another highly symbolic conflict and that’s why it’s often mentioned in the same breath, but the myriad of other ethnic conflicts going on throughout the world are ignored.
The power of symbolic positions is that they strongly ensure group cohesion. You wear these symbols on your chest like a medal or a placard. They superficially resemble personal opinions, but actually they’re badges of membership. Most people don’t actually think hard about these issues or try to understand deeply what’s going on. Instead they are told what to believe and what to say by people that they trust and identify with. Once it’s clear what the “correct” position is, people will wear it with pride.
Deeply thinking about a complex issue is extremely resource intensive and most people just don’t care that much. We also want to clearly delineate things into categories of good/bad. It’s a natural heuristic that feels good. Once you know a thing is “good” you cheer it on. If a thing is “bad” you loudly denounce it with your peers. If a big thing happens, but you don’t know if it’s good or bad then you feel uncomfortable mental dissonance. Big things can’t just be left in a state of psychological limbo. You need to decide if it’s good or bad. And so we do, collectively.
This is why I mostly stay out of that conversation. I don’t know enough about the history or politics or general demographics of the region to have an informed and nuanced perspective. I just know it’s not good
And when you take that stance, you get called an enlightened centrist. I lack the words to express my frustration. Why is life so cheap to these people? Do they even fathom what’s being lost?
No, they don’t have any clue what’s being lost because they haven’t seen anything other than the flickering blue light of their computer monitor for the past 4 years.
The people least well adjusted (terminally online) are the ones online all the time upvoting and posting things and only generally interacting with others that are terminally online. This lack of interaction with other ideas leads to this radicalization and lack of care for others.
There’s no use in trying to convince the guy that hasn’t left mom’s basement in 6 years. What’s he gonna do? Get cheeto dust on me?
That, or they’re college pseudointellectuals who have become so isolated from the world outside their campus and the surrounding neighborhood and are lied to so constantly about how the world works (as it’s an institution where ideas don’t have to be factual or practical in order to keep being taught) that they’ve been brainwashed into thinking those ideas are applicable to every current problem in existence and into always being contrarian and automatically disagreeing with everything the mainstream says.
Genocidal/Politicidal history doesn’t predict political opposition though (e.g. Kazakhstan being struck by starvation campaigns as well, but juggling neutrality now)
Remember that elderly women that offered seeds to russian soldiers “so that at least some sunflowers will grow where they are going to die”. I think that kind of counts as greeting with flowers?
Oh my god how did I forget about sunflower grandma.
Imagine being a fresh-faced recruit to what you still believe to be a noble mission to liberate your own oppressed people. An easy mission at that - go in, march on Kyiv, overthrow the “nazi regime,” go home heroes. You show up, head held high, waiting for the cheers and thank-yous from those you think you’re here to protect. A sweet old lady walks up to you offering a gift! Sunflower seeds - peaceful, bright, lovely sunflower seeds. Then she says it. “At least some sunflowers will grow where you die.”
I fully support him in his efforts. if people are going to donate their money to such a sus story, let him spend their money. a fool and his money are soon parted.
100% of the time I mention this, that’s the advice I’ve gotten. I have tried like 20 strains, edibles, oil, shatter, you name it. I used to smoke every day.
Now no matter what I smoke, anxiety. Sometimes it’s just a little and I have a good time anyway. Sometimes I’m not getting enough air when I breathe and I’m going to pass out and everything I say is the dumbest thing anyone has ever said in history.
Not worth the gamble anymore. I’m cool with rolling every few months and delicious delicious adderall. And too much beer, which is the worst habit one can have, honestly.
Oh you’re all good! I always expect to hear then when I mention the anxiety hahaha
I still give it a go every so often. It’s always best when I can go be active in nature, and worst when I sit at home and try to do… anything or nothing.
I miss how awesome it made some music, and getting to blasted I would watch a whole movie, love it, and forget it the next day. Double movie enjoyment!
I feel ya there, 100%! Frankly, I feel the same with psilocybin; active in the world, away from people and obvious aspects of civilization. Get out of my own head and up with the birds in the branches & clouds. 🤙🏼
Silly nosy question: what do you get out of Adderall? I’m prescribed ADHD meds and don’t get any recreational benefit from it, so I’m just curious what I’m missing out on.
When I take adderall, I usually take 10mg or so. It makes me much more productive than I usually am. I have a giant list of projects that I want to do, but normally I just… don’t do them because of the effort involved.
Or I start something and love it, then the next day I just kinda forget about it. It helps me make progress on my 1,000 Steam games I never play. I’ll actually sit down for a few hours and play a game, THE SAME GAME even.
Last time I had some, I set up my mini server! She’s amazing. Next time I have some, I’m either going to reformat my main game computer, reformat the VR machine that’s been sitting in the living room for months and set that up, or learn UNRAID and set up my big server I have all of the parts and HDDs for. That’s been under the couch for like six months now.
…when I write it out like that, I should prooooobably talk to a doctor.
Sounds like you use it for about the same reason I do.
Talk to a doctor! I found it much less stressful than I expected it to be. I started meds last year and my consult and check-ins have been all online. The biggest problem has been, ironically, remembering to take my meds constantly consistently.
I’m a serial hobby-starter, but not a project-finisher.
If you have ADHD, stimulants regulate you. If you don’t have ADHD, stimulants…stimulate you. Adderall is an amphetamine, so people without attention deficit disorders basically get a light meth high from it.
Not necessarily disagreeing with you, but nowadays there’s thousands of different types, and hundreds of different modes, and they all are reactively different.
It would certainly be an interesting show watching an armed man in a forest coming up to attackers and trying to hug them, telling how much he loves them and making friends.
That’s a good point. He could have been fragged or set up for a own goal. It probably wouldn’t be difficult. Tell him it’s safe and send him out after a bender?
You forgot the third, less plausible explanation: General was talking shit about Putin, did not realize that Vladimir Vladimirovich is always listening.
1847: Mexican–American War: On two occasions, Lieutenant Colonel Braxton Bragg (later a Confederate general) survived an attempt on his life when an artillery shell exploded under his bed.
When Schrödinger was present in the SGC (season 3, when they dealt with the Tollan), the standard issue service weapon was still the MP5. The P90 was only introduced around the middle of season 4.
I don’t think I can make fun of trekkies being obsessed with their trivia anymore.
Luckily p90s were issued before the Tollan were wiped out by Tanith.
So theoretically it’s possible, but only technically. I got the feeling they didn’t visit the SGC after they left except the two other times we see them. During O’Neill’s “rebel” phase to expose Maybournes’ off world shenanigans, and the very episode where they end.
I might be a bit of a Stargate nerd… And I can’t even make fun if star trek nerds either because I’m one of those, too…
Not just radioactive soil, literally in the red zone of Chernobyl in a forest, you cant get more radioactive unless you dig a trench in the Elefants foot directly.
Funny thing is, game called STALKER is very popular in Russia, and as anyone who ever played it can say: we stay the fuck away from the Red Forest unless completely necessary
noncredibledefense
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