>The weapon was able to produce doughnut shaped rings of plasma and balls of lightning that exploded with devastating effects when hitting its target.
>The plasma projectiles would be shot at a speed expected to be 3000 km/s in 1995 and 10,000 km/s (3% of the speed of light) by 2000. A shot has the energy of 5 pounds of TNT exploding.
>The project's initial success led to it becoming classified, and only a few references to MARAUDER appeared after 1993.
>The project may or may not have been scrapped some time after 1995.
Is it PrepHoleino?
source?
oh yeah i've stumbled upon it once a decade and there never really was any more info revealed.
Well only 2 more decades and it should become public if it was a nothingburger like project pluto
The limitation is capacitors, there hasn't been any major changes in the technology for many years. The lack of very high voltage high capacity caps stands in the way of all kinds of energy weapons and railguns.
We need 10x better batteries before energy weapons could become real.
>batteries
anti matter fueled
>10x better
I too enjoy nice round numbers
They could be real on ships with their large on board power plants, if only the capacitors were better.
>The limitation is capacitors, there hasn't been any major changes in the technology for many years.
They managed to make any further trace of MARAUDER disappear after '93, it doesn't occur to you that they could do the same with other things? Such as the actual level of capacitor tech?
It's not so much that as "Pulsed power" has been the limiting factor on basically every directed energy weapons project for the past thirty years. Railguns, coilguns, directed plasma, you name it, it's probably limited by the ability to go from zero energy to full energy with almost no ramp-up and do it in a controlled, reliable, repeatable way. Lasers don't have this limitation which is why we're seeing them operationalized in all sorts of shit.
Capacitor tech is too useful in a myriad of other things to keep that kind of information under wraps. It's the downfall of any "X is suppressing Y technology" conspiracy theory; there are almost always way too many other groups who would have a vested interest in the tech in question not being suppressed to make sense.
>weapon
It showed little application to be weaponized. Nothing about the setup indicated it would be possible to mount it in any kind of form which would fire a projectile any significant distance, nevermind the power requirements or the size of the thing.
it's not real
Its more real than russian gains
Its just maybe not a viable weapon
it was real, but that capacitor bank known as the shiva star was VERY impractical.
>Mach 9.5
>5lbs of TNTe
what the fuck? I expected way more
Kinetic energy depends on both speed and mass, and plasma is lighter than air
you meant less dense, also plasma is hot as fuck and will expand upon contact enveloping the target with gas as hot as the surface of the sun
old and busted
No, improved upon. Soon, you will see horrors beyond your comprehension.
>10,000 km/s (3% of the speed of light) by 2000. A shot has the energy of 5 pounds of TNT exploding.
if I remember my math right, firing a projectile weighing a single gram at 1% of speed of light from infantry weapon would send the 100kg soldier flying 300m/s in opposite direction
3000 kmg/s vs 30'000 kgm/s but in either case that wouldn't happen because the body can't absorb all that momentum. It would just leave a neat circular tunnel.
A relative of mine spent most of his career doing contract work for all of the major defense contractors and the DoD. He told me a about this thing once.
>biggest issue was the lack of high temperature superconductors
>to fire the weapon they resorted to using explosives to force the contacts together as quickly as possible to minimize arcing
>some of of the scientists looked like they were straight out of a movie
>time to fire the weapon
>can't watch and had wait in the cafeteria with the other subcontractors
>nothing crazy happens just a boom
>a few minutes pass
>mad scientist looking dude walks in and has this crazy expression on his face
>I THINK WE JUST DESTROYED THE EARTH
>everyone is confused
His reasoning was the plasma had entered space and would interact with the solar wind where it would grow to unlimited size and potentially collide with earth after orbiting the sun for some time. Needless to say he is probably wrong.
Nice. A real life Black Mesa. Sandia noobs beware.
Also I think Pine Gap is the real Black Mesa
The real black Mesa is the alphabet agency research facility out in the southwest. You know, the one that Black Mesa was based on. Seeing as you haven't made the connection yourself, you aren't ever going to be there. You're simply not smart or resourceful enough.
That’s above your pay grade son
Your own post has the answer. Let's work backwards.
KE = mv^2
therefore m = 2KE/v^2
KE = 5lb of tnt (4,600,000J/kg) = 10,442,000J
v = 10,000m/s
Therefore m = 0.000208840000 g
Your projectile will never hit the target. It will explode on contact with atmosphere because it weighs nothing relative to the atmosphere you need it to displace.
It doesn't work like that. Only energy and energy absorbed per distance determines how far an object penetrates some medium. That being said producing the plasma is an extremely inefficient process and the EM aspect of it causes all sorts of other problems, one being a high energy loss in air (has nothing to do with mass though).
aren't plasma weapons supposed to be lightning cannons essentially? I thought the plasma just directs the energy to the target
This sounds similar to that new Fusion power concept
So this is basically a PPG from Babylon 5?
You mean a PPC from Battletech?
Pretty sure that's what OP's post is about.
The handguns in Babylon 5 shoot balls of highly compressed plasma.
I can only hope that pray that sooner or later whatever they've been doing with MARAUDER comes to light, kind of like the oopsie with the MKV when it was loudly and publicly terminated less than six months after vid related came out and then in 2015 Boeiing, Raytheon and Lockmart all said that they were working on an improved version of it it before issuing another statement to the effects of "whoops, no we're not; please forget we said that".
descent if it were real
Probably scrapped because the energy requirements so that the projectile didn't immediately dissipate were too high to use anywhere. Far simpler rail guns have this problem to this day, and those require a lot less energy to use.
There'd be no reason to hide its existence otherwise. Wunderwaffe are things that you show off so that everyone knows to be afraid of you not something you hide.
>Wunderwaffe are things that you show off so that everyone knows to be afraid of you not something you hide.
I mean, that kinda depends on the nature of the wunderwaffle in question.
Spy type stuff you want to hide, but a plasma cannon is something you want to show off.
Like in the last few years the Army has made sure to show off how much Augmented Reality tech they have in the works, like F35 pilot helmets, the IVAS, etc. Or how advanced combat drones are.
Unless its for spook shit you want to televise it.
They were public about predicting airborne laser weapons to be fielded within the decade openly back in the early 2000s, so its not like the US military likes to keep tight lips about cutting edge developments.
Funnily said lasers were probably screwed over due to a lack of sufficient battery storage capabilities. A reoccurring issue across the board.
>Wunderwaffe are things that you show off
there are things you wanna keep under wraps so the enemy doesn't know when he has over extended before its too late
my fave black project
is it true that this is the 'iron curtain' of the US? Like if someone did fire nukes this shit would just zap them all out of the sky?
i want to work at black mesa
it's not fair