Thermoelectric Blaster Flings Ice Projectiles

November 11, 2024 by Lewin Day 38 Comments

Nerf blasters are fun and all, but flinging foam can get old. Picking it up again, even moreso. This blaster from [Concept Crafted Creations] gets around that annoying problem by shooting ice instead.

The concept was to build a better water gun with longer range—and what better way to do that than by shooting ice instead? The blaster relies on a PVC air tank for propulsion—one of the most controversial design choices you can make if you read the comments around here. It’s charged by a small air compressor, and dumping the air is handled by a solenoid valve. So far, so simple.

What makes this blaster special is where it gets its ammunition from. The blaster uses a custom CNC-machined block from PCBway to act as a freeze chamber. Water enters an aluminum block, and is cooled by thermoelectric elements. Once the projectile has frozen inside the chamber, it’s stuck in place, so the chamber is then heated by a small heating element. This melts the projectile just enough to allow it to be fired.

It’s a complicated but ingenious way of building an ice blaster. It does pack some real punch, too. It shoots the ice projectiles hard enough to shatter wine glasses. That’s enough to tell us you don’t want to be aiming this thing at your pals in a friendly match of Capture the Flag. Stick to paintballs, perhaps. Video after the break. Continue reading “Thermoelectric Blaster Flings Ice Projectiles” →

Bogey Six O’clock!: The AN/APS-13 Tail Warning Radar

October 31, 2024 by Danie Conradie 20 Comments

Although we think of air-to-air radar as a relatively modern invention, it first made its appearance in WWII. Some late war fighters featured the AN/APS-13 Tail Warning Radar to alert the pilot when an enemy fighter was on his tail. In [WWII US Bombers]’ fascinating video we get a deep dive into this fascinating piece of tech that likely saved many allied pilots’ lives.

Fitted to aircraft like the P-51 Mustang and P-47 Thunderbolt, the AN/APS-13 warns the pilot with a light or bell if the aircraft comes within 800 yards from his rear. The system consisted of a 3-element Yagi antenna on the vertical stabilizer, a 410 Mhz transceiver in the fuselage, and a simple control panel with a warning light and bell in the cockpit.

In a dogfight, this allows the pilot to focus on what’s in front of him, as well as helping him determine if he has gotten rid of a pursuer. Since it could not identify the source of the reflection, it would also trigger on friendly aircraft, jettisoned wing tanks, passing flak, and the ground. This last part ended up being useful for safely descending through low-altitude clouds.

This little side effect turned out to have very significant consequences. The nuclear bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki each carried four radar altimeters derived from the AN/APS-13 system.

Continue reading “Bogey Six O’clock!: The AN/APS-13 Tail Warning Radar” →

DIY Laser Tag Project Does It In Style

October 26, 2024 by Donald Papp 21 Comments

This DIY lasertag project designed by [Nii], which he brought to Tokyo Maker Faire back in September, is a treasure trove. It’s all in Japanese and you’ll need to visit X (formerly Twitter) to see it, but the images do a fine job of getting the essentials across and your favorite translator tool will do a fair job of the rest.

There’s a whole lot to admire in this project. The swing-out transparent OLED display is super slick, the electronics are housed on a single PCB, the back half of the grip is in fact a portable USB power bank that slots directly in to provide power, and there’s a really smart use of a short RGB LED strip for effects.

The optical elements show some inspired design, as well. An infrared LED points forward, and with the help of a lens, focuses the beam tightly enough to make aiming meaningful. For detecting hits, the top of the pistol conceals a custom-made reflector that directs any IR downward into a receiver, making it omnidirectional in terms of hit sensing but only needing a single sensor.

Want to know more? Check out [Nii]’s earlier prototypes on his website. It’s clear this has been in the works for a while, so if you like seeing how a project develops, you’re in for a treat.

As for the choice of transparent OLED displays? They are certainly cool, and we remember how wild it looks to have several stacked together.

The US’s New Nuclear Weapons, Mysterious Fogbanks And Inertial Confinement Fusion

October 11, 2024 by Maya Posch 52 Comments

Keeping the United States’ nuclear arsenal ready for use is an ongoing process, one which is necessarily shrouded in complete secrecy. In an article by The War Zone these developments and the secrets behind it are touched upon, including a secret ingredient for these thermonuclear warheads that is only officially known as ‘Fogbank’, but which is very likely aerogel.

As noted by a commentator, this is pretty much confirmed in an article published by Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) in the 2nd 2009 issue (PDF) of Nuclear Weapons Journal. On page nine the article on hohlraum-based inertial confinement fusion notes the use of aerogel to tamp the radially inward motion of the wall material, suggesting a similar function within one of these thermonuclear warheads.

The research at the Nuclear Ignition Facility (NIF) over at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is directly related to these thermonuclear weapons, as they are based around inertial confinement fusion (ICF), which is what the NIF is set up for to study, including the role of aerogel. ICF is unlikely to ever be used for energy production, as we noted in the past, but makes it possible to study aspects of detonating a thermonuclear weapon that are difficult to simulate and illegal to test with real warheads.

Currently it seems that after decades of merely reusing the Fogbank material in refurbished warheads, new material is now being produced again, with it likely being used in the new W93 warhead and the low-yield W76 and life-extended W76-1 variants. All of which is of course pure conjecture, barring the details getting leaked on the War Thunder forums to settle a dispute on realistic US thermonuclear weapon yields.

Learning How A Nuclear Missile Stays On Target

August 20, 2024 by Al Williams 75 Comments

In 1962, unlike today, most things didn’t have computers in them. After all, the typical computer of the day was a fragile room-sized box that required a gaggle of high priests to service it. But the Minuteman I nuclear missile was stuffed full of pre-GPS navigation equipment and a computer. In a few years, by 1970, the Minuteman III could deliver a warhead 13,000 km with an accuracy of 200 meters. Each one cost about a half million dollars, but that’s almost five million in today’s money. [Ken] takes on a very detailed tour of the computers and avionics that were nothing short of a miracle — and a highly classified miracle — in the 1960s.

The inertial navigation relied on a gyroscope, which in those days, were large and expensive. The Minuteman I required alignment with a precise angle relative to the North Star which naturally wasn’t visible from inside the silo. By the time Minuteman II arrived, they’d figured out an easier way to orient the missiles.

Continue reading “Learning How A Nuclear Missile Stays On Target” →

A screenshot of the website, showing various parts from Western manufacturers

How Many Western ICs Are There In Russia’s Weapons?

June 8, 2024 by Arya Voronova 60 Comments

Recently, the Ukrainian government has published a database of Western components being used in recently produced Russian armaments, and it’s a fascinating scroll. Just how much does Russia rely on Western manufacturers’ parts? It turns out, a surprising amount. For instance, if you are wondering which ICs are used to build Iran-produced Shahed drones, it seems that it’s a whole bunch of Texas Instruments parts, as well as some Maxim, Intel, and Xilinx ones. Many of the parts in the lists are MCUs and FPGAs, but it’s also surprising how many of the components are jelly bean parts with multiple suppliers.

There appear to be thousands of parts listings, compiled from a good few dozen pieces of equipment that volunteers appear to have taken apart and scrupulously documented – just take a look at the dropdowns at the top of the page. The Ukrainian government is advocating for parts restrictions to be implemented based upon this data – as we all remember, it’s way harder to produce hardware when you can’t buy crucial ICs.

Even for a regular hacker, this database is worth a scroll, if only to marvel at all the regular parts we wouldn’t quite associate with military use. Now, all that’s left is to see whether any of the specific chips pictured have been sold to washing machine manufacturers.

Chinese Subs May Be Propelled Silently By Lasers

April 24, 2024 by Richard Baguley 62 Comments

If sharks with lasers on their heads weren’t bad enough, now China is working on submarines with lasers on their butts. At least, that’s what this report in the South China Morning Post claims, anyway.

According to the report, two-megawatt lasers are directed through fiber-optic cables on the surface of the submarine, vaporizing seawater and creating super-cavitation bubbles, which reduce drag on the submarine. The report describes it as an “underwater fiber laser-induced plasma detonation wave propulsion” system and claims that the system could generate up to 70,000 newtons of thrust, more than one of the turbofan engines on a 747.

The report (this proxy can get around the paywall) claims that the key to the system are the tiny metal spheres that direct the force of the cavitation implosion to propel the submarine. Similar to a magnetohydrodynamic drive (MHD), there’s no moving parts to make noise. Such a technology has the potential to make China’s submarines far harder to detect.

Looking for more details, we traced the report back to the original paper written by several people at Harbin Engineering University, entitled “Study on nanosecond pulse laser propulsion microspheres based on a tapered optical fiber in water environment“, but it’s still a pre-print. If you can get access to the full paper, feel free to chime in — we’d love to know if this seems like a real prospect or just exaggerated reporting by the local ~~propaganda~~ media.

[Image via Wikimedia Commons]