Lifeboat Foundation

New capacitors offer big power storage and transmission in a mini-package, with benefits beyond electro-cannons.

The U.S. Navy’s shipboard railgun is moving from the lab to the testing range, a big step for a weapon designed to fire massive bullets at hypersonic speeds. But a separate breakthrough in electrical pulse generation — capacitors that provide a bigger jolt in a smaller package — that may reshape the future of naval power.

The railgun’s electromagnets are designed to accelerate a Hyper Velocity Projectile from zero to some 8,600 kmph, about Mach 7. That velocity requires a lot of power. In early testing, the Office of Naval Research had relied on banks of commercial capacitors to pulse electricity to the gun. But they were “not suitable for integration aboard a ship” — too large to fit aboard Zumwalt-class destroyers, as Thomas Beutner, head of ONR’s Naval Air Warfare and Weapons Department, explained during a July event in Washington.

Continue reading “The US Navy’s Railgun Breakthrough Could Change Energy Storage” »

A service lab has turned a lieutenant’s brainstorm into a testable prototype dubbed the GunnAR augmented-reality headset.

In just a year, a wearable headset designed to help U.S. Navy gunnery sailors cut through the fog of combat has evolved from a lieutenant’s brainstorm to a prototype being tested in various exercises.

Conceived by a junior officer aboard the destroyer Gridley, the idea for GunnAR was presented at last year’s ONR Innovation Jam, where it received first prize — and $100,000 to make it real. After rapid progressions through various development milestones, the blue-tinted visor was put to the test in the Trident Warrior 2017 experiment aboard USS Bunker Hill, where sailors used it to put live fire on targets.

Continue reading “US Navy Gunners Are Testing A Wearable Heads-Up Display” »

At the 2017 Naval Future Force Science and Technology Expo in Washington DC, an ONR spokesman revealed that the weapon is ready for field demonstrations at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division’s new railgun Rep-Rate Test Site at Terminal Range, according to New Atlas.

Initial rep-rate fires (repetition rate of fires) of multi-shot salvos already have been successfully conducted at low muzzle energy, officials say.

Continue reading “US Navy’s mach 6 railgun set for first tests outside the lab” »

Sweden’s government has exposed sensitive and personal data of millions, along with the nation’s military secrets, in what is now considered to be one of the worst government IT disasters ever. The leak, which occurred in 2015, saw the names, photos and home addresses of millions exposed. Those affected include fighter pilots of Swedish air force, police suspects, people under the witness relocation programme, members of the military’s most secretive units (equivalent to the SAS or SEAL teams) and more.

The leak occurred after the Swedish Transportation Agency (STA) decided to outsource its database management and other IT services to firms such as IBM and NCR. However, the STA uploaded its entire database onto cloud servers, which included details on every single vehicle in the country. The database was then emailed to marketers in clear text message. When the error was discovered, the STA merely sent another email asking the marketing subscribers to delete the previous list themselves.

In 2016, the US military’s budget was about $580 billion more than NASA’s.

The US military’s nuclear arsenal is controlled by computers built in the 1970s that still use 8in floppy disks.

A report into the state of the US government, released by congressional investigators, has revealed that the country is spending around $60bn (£40.8bn) to maintain museum-ready computers, which many do not even know how to operate any more, as their creators retire.

The Defense Department’s Strategic Automated Command and Control System (DDSACCS), which is used to send and receive emergency action messages to US nuclear forces, runs on a 1970s IBM computing platform. It still uses 8in floppy disks to store data.

Continue reading “US nuclear arsenal controlled by 1970s computers with 8in floppy disks” »

SAN JOSE, Calif. – The U.S. Department of Defense is working with partners on multiple technologies that would make any foundry a trusted source to make classified ASICs for the military. If the government is successful it will be able to tap leading-edge process technologies from multiple fabs by 2019.

The U.S. government currently works with a single fab now operated by Globalfoundries and limited to 32nm and higher design rules. The partnership is a continuation of a longstanding “trusted foundry” deal with IBM, which sold its fabs to GF in 2015.

“We have a very good partner in Globalfoundries, and many people are still there from the [former] IBM…[that help] manage that government ASIC business, and that still works quite well for 32nm and up,” said Bill Chappell, a director at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that oversees the trusted foundry programs.

My HuffPost article from yesterday on military, #transhumanism and science was on the frontpage of Reddit today with nearly 12,000 upvotes & This was a policy article of my libertarian CA governor campaign. I’m happy to see it do so well.

Two years ago, Barack Obama appointed a new Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter—a technocrat physicist, an arms control veteran, and a professor at Stanford—to help close this divide. During his tenure, Carter set up a virtual outpost in Silicon Valley. He worked to make it easier for tech companies to sell things to the Pentagon, for their engineers to work there, and for their bosses to offer up advice. He even let WIRED tag along and write a profile of him. He also impressed the local royalty. “He’s been amazing,” Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, told me in an interview.

The former Secretary of Defense built a bridge between tech and the Pentagon. Here, he talks about its importance in an uncertain time.