Science Porn

[Fireball]

"A few representative kill-death rays have been drawn"

I'm thinking that if one was to make that ellipsoid one foot wide instead of a body of revolution that it would make a really neat saw. Though with the earth rotating, it would be able to cleave it in half.

UNable. FFS. My lack of perfection just pisses me off.

[SteelCurtain]

So my iPod on the antiquated dock in my bathroom was set on random, and it played an old episode on 99 Percent Invisible that I hadn't heard in a long time. (If you haven't listened to 99pi, and you love awesome stories in short form, do yourself a favor) It didn't pique my interest the first time I heard it, but this time, it fascinated me.

Apparently, in WWI, before the Americans entered the war when we were sending supplies to the Brits, the problem of U-Boats was dire. So we tried camouflage, but high similarity camouflage was dumb when you have a smokestack billowing black smoke on the horizon. So we developed this disruptive camouflage (like zebras use) called Razzle, sometimes called Dazzle.



In WWI times, torpedoes had no tracking or homing, so they had to be fired like a quarterback throws a football, leading the receiver. So the direction that the target was headed relative to you, the speed of the ship, the length of the ship, were all factors in the trigonometry that the torpedoman would have to calculate on the fly.

Razzle Dazzle worked by confusing the torpedoman.



Could you imagine looking through the periscope and trying to gauge which direction that ship is going?



These ships were painted in outrageous colors, too. Not just black and white. Those colors could be orange, yellow, pink.

It's difficult to measure exactly how effective Dazzle was, but there is no question that it was effective. Very effective.

Cool ass shit.

[Alex K]

Lol! I'd be like - ok, for starters, how many ships is that anyway? The Dazzle-Painted merchant ship looks like it's sinking already (apart from the masts, which kind of give it away, but were maybe not as clearly visible as on the picture)

[SteelCurtain]

Yeah, but it is painted so that the direction of the bow is misleading. The razzle dazzle ship looks like it might be constant bearing, decreasing range (coming right at you) but it's not.

[Anomalocaris]

That kind of dazzle naval camo decreased in usage in WWII.  It was designed for a specific situation, confusing an observer at short to medium range looking through a periscope at wave top level.  It is counterproductive in most other situations.  That's why WWII naval camouflage tends to be somewhat more subdued, with more focus on systematically matching the luminance of background sea and sky, and on intentionally creating a specific false impression of the ship's length, size of bow and stern waves, and blurring the deck line, and creating false impression of how far above water the deck is, in order to confuse the observer at a variety of ranges and looking from variety of altitudes regarding the range to target rather than aimed mainly at making it hard to judge which way the target is going. The WWII type camo has the added benefit of making the ship blend into the back ground sky or sea in any hazy situation.

[SteelCurtain]

Yes, with the advent of sonar, it's use/effectiveness decreased massively. When torpedoes were fired by sight, like a slow ass bullet, this was great. That was the entire reason it was used. Also, with advances in engine tech and scrubbers on stacks, the very things that made blend camo nearly useless in WWI were decreased dramatically.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

That kind of dazzle naval camo decreased in usage in WWII.  It was designed for a specific situation, confusing an observer at short to medium range looking through a periscope at wave top level.  It is counterproductive in most other situations.  That's why WWII naval camouflage tends to be somewhat more subdued, with more focus on systematically matching the luminance of background sea and sky, and on intentionally creating a specific false impression of the ship's length, size of bow and stern waves, and blurring the deck line, and creating false impression of how far above water the deck is, in order to confuse the observer at a variety of ranges and looking from variety of altitudes regarding the range to target rather than aimed mainly at making it hard to judge which way the target is going. The WWII type camo has the added benefit of making the ship blend into the back ground sky or sea in any hazy situation.

This is why it always bothers me to see non-black-colored starships, especially warships, in every Sci-Fi show.

Presuming they could, by technology, defeat detection sensors like radar, in any proximity to a star they'd shine like a beacon-- after all, we can pick up surprisingly small asteroids via telescope from here on earth.

As to the dazzle paint, the Brits even tried it on their tanks in the desert, such as this Matilda II :

[vorlon13]

Always wondered what the inspiration was for these behemoths.

[brewer]

I'm going with hippie shrooms.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

"NASA's Kepler mission has verified 1,284 new planets – the single largest finding of planets to date.

“This announcement more than doubles the number of confirmed planets from Kepler,” said Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth.”

Analysis was performed on the Kepler space telescope’s July 2015 planet candidate catalog, which identified 4,302 potential planets. For 1,284 of the candidates, the probability of being a planet is greater than 99 percent – the minimum required to earn the status of “planet.” An additional 1,327 candidates are more likely than not to be actual planets, but they do not meet the 99 percent threshold and will require additional study. The remaining 707 are more likely to be some other astrophysical phenomena. This analysis also validated 984 candidates previously verified by other techniques. [...] In the newly-validated batch of planets, nearly 550 could be rocky planets like Earth, based on their size. Nine of these orbit in their sun's habitable zone, which is the distance from a star where orbiting planets can have surface temperatures that allow liquid water to pool. With the addition of these nine, 21 exoplanets now are known to be members of this exclusive group."

(Article continues from there. Omissions and bolding my own.)

http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasas-...discovered