Oct
30
Rocketman and Super Powers
Submitted by Jack Pate under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
In the annals of military misconduct, are the stories of numerous military personnel and civilian personnel who purloined certain military materiel for their own purposes. Such theft is cause for severe punishment in some circumstances. Sometimes it is cause for military retribution including dishonorable discharges, prison time, and so forth. Sometimes it is somewhat humorous. Other times it is both humorous and tragic.
Having a local military installation nearby, we periodically hear news of misconduct such as military and civilian personnel selling equipment or stealing equipment for their own use. I learned the story of one soldier who was smart enough to figure out how to steal a rocket motor from an installation.
He was not smart enough to calculate the physics of its use. He perceived that he would be able to make his automobile perform some feats of speed otherwise unattainable if he were to mount a bracket under his automobile to use the motor of a small rocket.
Again, he was bright enough to design a bracket to hold the rocket. He was not trained well enough to know how to calculate the physics of specific impulse, thrust, and the burning time of the rocket.
He figured out how to mount and ignite the rocket and set about on his project. The military officer who described the scene told me that the path of the car proceeded down a paved road. Clearly the rocket motor burned very powerfully and exceeded the speed that the driver of the car could negotiate. By the end of the ride, the car had left with the tires skidded to shreds along a large extent of the path, the tires burning up. Meanwhile, the brakes on the vehicle had been completely burned up. The vehicle eventually became airborne. The car had achieved such speed that it had been launched off the road destroying the car, the driver, and the future of an errant soldier.
People are fascinated with the concept of super powers. Connecting a rocket to an automobile is hardly a super power. Yet the management and handling of that power is terrifying. True, cartoons show all kinds of clap-trap and humorous concoctions of devices. However, those are cartoons. The actual equipment is very real, is governed by very real laws of physics, and is not handled except on principles of engineering appropriate for the task. Why people long for super powers when they are so incapable of handling the limited power already available to them is beyond me. Clearly, we do not understand all consequences that would result if we had the power to change many of our mundane circumstances.
Oct
2
Balancing Power and Control
Submitted by Jack Pate under Business | Leave a Comment
In business, creative, energetic people like many inventors are often very dynamic. I always advise them that they will destroy their companies if they do not harness or “bracket” that energy. However, unbridled administrative control has strangled much innovation and many companies. Likewise unbridled creativity has driven companies to destruction like our test torpedo. Creativity and administration are both required, working in harmony and balance.
If you have ever had occasion to service a common, household, washing machine, you have seen a comparatively small electric motor that drives the mechanical motion of the tub and agitator. On an advanced torpedo, we were working with a motor of similar but security-classified design, and security-classified performance. Suffice it to say that a motor about the size of a washing machine electric motor was turning out the kind of horsepower automotive engines produce. Meanwhile, an electric battery was designed to literally consume itself during the tactical operation time designed for this torpedo.
The premise of the advanced torpedo was a helicopter launch. The chopper, from the deck of a ship, could navigate through air much faster than a ship through water. With appropriate sonar and other gear, shipboard and airborne target detection equipment would identify a threat water craft, such as a submarine. A helicopter would be launched to pursue. Eventually the helicopter would drop an advanced torpedo into the ocean in the vicinity of the targeted threat.
The torpedo would do a short loop as it scanned, acquiring the target, and would then race toward the target at an unprecedented speed to deliver a “shaped charge” warhead into the hull. This was not the technology of “Run Silent, Run Deep.” Here the ship was no longer a gun; the submarine was no longer an aiming platform for precision aiming of the torpedo. In this case, the torpedo was a “fire-and-forget” self-guiding, seeker and destroyer.
On one occasion a test motor was installed in a test fixture, a tank in a laboratory at the facility developing the motor and power system. However, someone had not secured the bracketing hardware. Again, this was no toy. This was a full-sized, tactically capable, motor section for a very powerful and fast torpedo. When the test device (torpedo motor section) was initiated, it came to life in a spectacular way, shooting forward through the tank instead of churning water past its stationary test-fixture position.
Freed from its brackets, it actually traveled with tremendous speed and power. The torpedo engine section and power module together raced to the end of the tank and plowed right through the barrier, launching through the wall at the end of the laboratory.
Much like the checks and balances we talk about in government and other organizations, a tremendous amount of power, unleashed, can do a lot of destruction. Whether kept in check by one’s own personal values and administrative limits, or by those of others, power must be harnessed to be useful. Unharnessed , it is typically useless and destructive.