“They look mighty odd, I’ll grant you, but they have the eyes of a hawk and the nose of a bloodhound. The poachers and smugglers hate them!” The Maynard Menschenjäger is a distinctive model of robot armoured tactical system (RATS) cybershell. Its body is a bi-convex disc that is triangular rather than circular in plan […]
Disc-shaped grenades date back to at least the First World War. They did not mature as a weapon system until several advances in technology had occurred. The first of these was improvements in explosives. More powerful explosives such as octonitrocubane allow for better use to be made of the saucer grenade’s limited capacity. The second […]
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“What has the body of a cat, the head of an owl and the feet of a monkey?” Many military cybershells take animal-like forms. Many militaries and agencies make use of “reconnaissance CATS” (Cybernetic Autonomous Tactical Systems), cybershells the size and configuration of house cats. These are used in an infiltration, observation and reporting role. […]
Directed energy weapons, laser rangefinders, designators and electro-optical systems are common on the THS-era battlefield. Consequently smoke systems that can counter such threats have become increasingly important. During the fighting in the city of Grozny in the 1990s the Russians discovered smoke was vital and consequently “every fourth or fifth Russian artillery or mortar round […]
“What else do you want to know? In the centre of the ship is a bit we call the core or “storm cellar”. This is where you want to be if there is a solar flare or some devil is shooting a particle gun at you. It is the most shielded part of the living […]
“Besides the usual cargo lock we had three Kwikloks. A Kwiklok is an Iron Maiden without spikes; it fits a man in a suit, leaving just a few pints of air to scavenge, and cycles automatically. A big time saver in changing shifts. I passed through the middle-sized one; Tiny, of course, used the big […]
Mayflies are a class of spacecraft described on p.94 of GURPS Terradyne. They may plausibly be encountered in a Transhuman Space or many other space-based scenarios. Mayflies are one-use orbit-to-surface cargo transports. More material is sent from orbit than is brought up from Earth (or Mars) so a considerable proportion is sent down by mayfly. […]
As early as the start of the 21st century accelerometers could be produced that were cheap enough and compact enough to be incorporated into a variety of everyday devices. Mobile phones and tablets used these components to detect which way up a device was and modify the screen display accordingly. Other applications used them to […]
A certain TV channel is currently reshowing “SeaQuest DSV”. Appropriate, since the first season is set in 2018. When the series first ran an engineer friend of mine christened it “Dodgy Sea Vehicle”. We cremated that friend last year, so watching this series reminds me of a good friend whose wit and company I will […]