Bump: Def Tech’s 20 Biggest Posts of 2006

Out of the hun­dreds and hun­dreds of tech­nolo­gies, tac­tics, and polit­i­cal maneu­vers Defense Tech high­lighted, here are the twenty you guys clicked on the most in 2006. Thanks for another great year, every­one.
1) Clowns Sabotage Nuke Missile
On Tuesday morn­ing, a retired Catholic priest and two vet­er­ans put on clown suits, busted into a nuclear mis­sile launch facil­ity, and began beat­ing the silo cover with ham­mers, in an attempt to take the Minuteman III mis­sile off-​​line. Seriously.

2) Look Out, Pyongyang? Rail Gun in the Works
One of the big sell­ing points of the Navy’s new destroyer is that it can rain a whole lot of hell — 20 rocket-​​propelled artillery shells, in less than a minute — on tar­gets up to 63 nau­ti­cal miles away… But really, that’s the start. The ship’s real power will come when it moves away from chem­i­cal pow­ders to shoot its pro­jec­tiles — and starts rely­ing on elec­tro­mag­netic fields to shoot pro­jec­tiles almost six kilometers/​second, instead.
3) SEAL Ship: Silent But Deadly
Every ship­builder in the Navy these days talks about how his hulk­ing destroyer or Cold War sub is now going to sneak SEALs onto shore… Military​.com over­lord Chris Michel was down in San Diego, and saw a pretty cool new pro­to­type ship that’s been designed from scratch to han­dle the mis­sion.
4) Air Force Plan: Hack Your Nervous System
The brain has always been a bat­tle­field. New weapons might be able to hack directly into your nerve cells and neural path­ways.
5) Marines Quiet About Brutal New Weapon
War is hell. But its worse when the Marines bring out their new urban com­bat weapon, the SMAW-​​NE. Which may be why theyre not talk­ing about it, much.
6) Urban Combat Skateboard!

7) Replacement Arm, Good as New
Thought-​​controlled robotic limbs were only the begin­ning. Robotic Frisbees of Death
It ain’t easy, pick­ing out evil-​​doers in the urban canyons of the Middle East; there are so many places to hide. Taking ‘em out can be even harder, what with all those non­com­bat­ants hang­ing nearby. But the Air Force thinks it might have an answer to this most vex­ing prob­lem in counter-​​insurgency: fris­bees. Not just any fris­bees, mind you. Robotic fris­bees. Heavily armed robotic fris­bees.
9) David and the Inflatable Goliath
Inside the Darpa project to build a humon­gous blimp that can haul 500‑1000 tons’ worth of sol­diers and gear halfway across the world in less than a week.
10) Falcon Fills Blackbird’s Shoes
A decade after the final retire­ment of Lockheed Martin’s Mach-​​3 SR-​​71 Blackbird spy plane, the Air Force is prepar­ing to test a plane that flies more than three times as fast. Two Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicles, built by Lockheed Martin with input from NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), will take to the air in 2008. The $100-​​million pro­gram aims to field a Mach-​​10 unmanned air­craft that can spy on for­eign pow­ers, drop bombs or even lob satel­lites into orbit.
11) Giant Slingshot: New Way to Space?
All space projects get into orbit pretty much the same way by burn­ing lots of rocket fuel, a space­ship pow­ers itself past the sky. But what if there was a dif­fer­ent approach? What if we could throw some­thing so hard, it would wind up in space?
12) Facial Armor Rears Its Ugly Head
No mat­ter how many times sol­diers and marines say they’re not inter­ested, there’s always some­one try­ing to wrap them up in heav­ier, hot­ter, more uncom­fort­able armor. The lat­est cul­prit: MTek Weapon Systems, which is push­ing Stormtrooper-​​esque “facial armor” for our troops.
13) Air Force’s Secret Drone Program Revealed
A new, $1.7 bil­lion, “Penetrating High Altitude Endurance” drone is thought to be able to cruise at 70,000–80,000 ft,soaring high above defended ter­ri­tory.
14) CIA’s Wacky, Online ‘Personality Quiz’
These are tough times for the Central Intelligence Agency. But can things have grown so dire at Langley that the CIA has to resort to gim­micks like this wink-​​wink-​​trying-​​to-​​be-​​ironic-​​and-​​cool-​​but-​​instead-​​looking-​​even-​​more-​​dorky recruit­ing web­site?
15) Pain Ray, Sonic Blaster, Laser Dazzler — All in One
For a while, now, I’ve been hear­ing about the Defense Department’s plans to out­fit a fight­ing vehi­cle with a pain ray, a sonic blaster, and a laser daz­zler, too. I never fig­ured they’d actu­ally send the thing to Iraq, though. Project Sheriff, I assumed, would just be the mil­i­tary equiv­a­lent of a con­cept car — a chance to see if some whiz-​​bang gear really worked together. But the Pentagon may wind up deploy­ing this straight-​​outta-​​sci-​​fi jalopy, after all.
16) Battle Ball for Sailor Training
Check out the Navy’s nine-​​foot plas­tic ball. It sits on wheels, enabling unlim­ited rota­tion in any direc­tion — mak­ing vir­tual real­ity feel a whole lot more real.
17) Chinese Laser vs. U.S. Sats?
Was it just China Hawks’ hype? Or did Beijing really blind U.S. satel­lites by fir­ing high-​​powered lasers at ‘em? And what does that mean for the future of America’s eyes and ears in the sky?
18) The Tech That Took Out Zarqawi
Ten years ago, tak­ing out Abu Musab Al-​​Zarqawi with F-​​16s would have been an impos­si­ble task. Not any more.
19) ‘Invisible’ Boomerang ‘Bot
It’s nice to have a set of robotic eyes in the sky. But sur­veil­lance drones tend to be loud, and rather obvi­ous, as they keep watch above a Middle Eastern city. That’s why a small com­pany out of Minneapolis, VeraTech Areo, has built a hand-​​held spy drone that it says is prac­ti­cally invis­i­ble.
20) Area 51: Hype vs. Reality
A vet­eran avi­a­tion journo writes about secret air­planes he believes might be under devel­op­ment at the Air Force’s remote Groom Lake test facil­ity in Nevada, a.k.a. Area 51. How much proof does he have?
(Big ups: Slate, and their sur­pris­ing top ten sto­ries of the year. And, and a note to Long Tailers: two of these posts were actu­ally from ’05.)

December 22nd, 2006 | Blog Bidness | 2380107 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/12/22/bump-def-techs-20-biggest-posts-of-2006/Bump%3A+Def+Tech%27s+20+Biggest+Posts+of+20062006-12-22+09%3A33%3A46jason You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.