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http://media2.foxnews.com/040606/040606_fr_tobin_300.swf

I hate to cite a douchebag outfit like fox news but this is fVcking incredible. Basically Israel has designed a crude but effective deflector sheild called "trophy" and the US is thinking of using it in Iraq to defend against missile attacks.
this comes only a couple of years after some rumors started spreading that one of the new "generation 4" nuclear weapons that are being designed is an antimatter warhead using a detonation system very similar to that of photon torpedos on star trek.
is anyone else horrified/excited about this stuff?

More information on the Trophy Active Defense System.

i just hope that if it's magnetic in nature that it doesn't go all philedelphia experiment on someone

This is simply being blown out of proportion. It fires fragments at the damn warhead- that's not a forcefield, it is simple interception. Clever as it is, it's not Star Trek.

The western power building the vehicle with the first forcefield device on is in fact the British, who have developed a system that vaporises warheads trying to penetrate armour and is going into production soon.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2004806,00.html

I love the new millenium.

Too bad this stuff is going to war. I want a personal use forcefield.

Originally posted by Arachnoidfreak
I love the new millenium.

Too bad this stuff is going to war. I want a personal use forcefield.

Well, you know what they say, necessity is the mother of invention - and with war and defense being such major parts of the primary scientific superpowers it doesn't seem surprising that breakthroughs in certain areas are often linked to military research.

Still I guess there are often knock on effects - force fields, actual force fields would be quite useful in a variety of areas, such as industry, science and so on. Not sure how useful it would be in everyday life - but it would still be cool, especially if it could defelct spilt wine from new white shirts.

We're a very very long way yet from the sci-fi notion of forcefields.

This Throphy is indeed nothing more than a bunch of radar-targeted claymores. Similair to the goalkeeper system used on ships, only that uses a gatling gun instead of flak-launchers.
It's far from a sustaining energetic forcefield and can be by-passed easily.
And where did the info on possible anti-matter weaponry come from? As far as I know the US still require a stadion-sized installation to store a pea-sized chunk of anti-matter in a safe manner.

a 2002 breakthrough in a scientific project called ATHENA allows for production and storage of cold antihydrogen with more and more in production at a lower and lower energy state. in 2004, an airforce munitions directorate spoke at nasa pretty much stating that they were doing research on antimatter based weaponry.
These are rumored to be positron bunker busters which wouldn't leave as much fallout as the current fission bombs and the possibility of a full on nuclear anhilliation warhead which would produce massive fallout and have a force equivelant to several terratons of tnt-ie. enough to plasma several counties into a crater, cause massive tectonic disturbances all over the globe, and create a sizable and lengthy EM pulse to knock out all electronics over a very large area.

Current bunker-busters can be qualified as convention weapons, it's their supportive tech and not the actual payload that makes them special (and by being so, the whole fallout issue is ridiculous, they contain 'ordinary' explosives). Some exemptions exist in the form of EMP warheads, but those are still just advanced microwave-ovens.
Effective anti-matter tech is in theory the answer to the world's energy crisis, and not even the USA would put it to use in warfare before using it to ensure full Independence concerning national energy demand.
If they were able to wield it, the global economy would have been tremendously disturbed, OPEC would be broke and America would have pulled back from all conflicts around the globe to sit tight on their island of independent supremacy.

i don't know about using antimatter for energy. There are too many risks, plus, if demands for energy continued to grow exponentially, wouldn't we eventually run out of matter to anihilate?

Originally posted by Darth Jello
i don't know about using antimatter for energy. There are too many risks, plus, if demands for energy continued to grow exponentially, wouldn't we eventually run out of matter to anihilate?

There's always soylent green.

The problem is that we probably wont, if we learn to gain and control anti-matter.
Statistics: the current nuclear tech provides let's say 1000 megawatt per kilo of uranium used. Nuclear fusion will provide 10.000 megawatts from the same quantity of fuel, and with no harmful waste-products made in the progress.
The estimate on energy production from anti-matter is a couple of million times the energy-output that can be gained by nuclear fusion when using the same quantity of fuels.
It is yet beyond our capability.

TROPHY is an interceptor shield