2,000 years of progress and it all boils down to this.. we are still throwing rocks at our adversarys...

and I say this becuase I've been reading up that the military will be using "inert" bombs in and around bagdad.

It seems these inert bombs are smart bombs filled with concrete designed to hit a hard targets such as small bunkers, tanks and dug in troop positions. to damage and destroy them while leaveing the surrounding area with little damage.

I'll agree that these are very high - tech and moderen, and prob a useful Idea, but to my mind it seems to all boil down to throwing rocks................

can't wait to see the "new" Stealth plane made out of low radar visible materials..I hear they are having trouble decideing between pine and Oak..............................

I think your missing the point-prevention of collateral damage both property and life. We could roll a flight of B-52's in and carpet bomb the place but that wouldn't set well with the world community.

Hey Tin can.. nope I'm not missing the point... as I made that point in my little rant.. I just find a little humor in the whole thing and its something new to put in the forums to talk about. :-)

It is kinda funny. A high-tech rock fight-GPS guided rocks. I wonder how much one of those costs?

I have just this minute thought up an idea for building a aircraft that cannot be crashed...... all structral material is to be made from a radar absorbant material called 'rubber'... only problem seems to be in developing a way to land the aircraft.

and I wonder where you would find pilots willing to fly rubber planes.........

Saw some pictures of the areas of Baghdad the Americans have taken on the telly. To paraphrase a US GI from WW2- the Americans sure liberated the hell out of that place.
The amount of footage on the tellly of this conflict sure gives a lot of reference material for us modellers though.

Wasnt there a program ( real or Reganized??) during Star Wars ( $$ not movies) called Brilliant Pebbles?
Essentially a bundle of iron rods in orbit with guidance packages, thought was to drop them onto targets from space.. sort of like the old wives tale of killing someone with a penny from the top of the Empire State Building.

I think something like it was n the Larry Niven Sci fi novel about the invasion of earth too..

Mike
too early, not enough coffee...

This war has progressed to the point now, I don't think we need worry about stealth. It has to hard to look up and shoot when there is so much on the ground shooting at you also. Might be better for these guys to throw in the towel, oppppsssssss, may sun burn head, maybe throw up the white flag. Well, maybe not that either, since the incidents eariler in the conflict.Better just run like hell and keep their heads down.

MLD, I think the novel in question may have been "Footfall" but I am not sure.

boom! that's the one..with the semi-elephantine invaders and the styling Michael Wheelan coverart..
Overall not as good as some of his other stuff, but the scene where the Abrams go rolling out across the fields and get swatted was pretty viscreal.

Mike

yep FootFall was a great book.. in fact I have a copy in my personal SF libary.. got a larger selection of SF than most bookstores...LOL....

And MLD The Star Wars Concept was called "Flying Crowbars" I read about it years ago during the height of the cold war during the Regean years.

The Idea was to hang bundles of Steel Bars on sattilate lauching platform.. the bars were to be equiped with a guidance system and coated in an Abantive heat shield the idea was to lauch them towards the battlefield and when they reached a certian altitude the sheilding was to open up so the seeking head could look for armor and guidance vanes were to steer it the final distance. The idea was to kill tanks with KKD's which stood for Kinetic Kill Devices.

anyways thats what I can remember anyways.. think it was dropped because it was cheaper to use TOW's, HellFire's and Vulcan Chain Guns.

basicly just another concept developed by Reagon to drive the USSR into bankruptcy tying to duplicate our technology.