Point Defence in Space Combat

Point Defence in Space Combat
Spacedock

I usually post stuff I when I have something to say on the subject. I don't know if I've got anything to say about the subject here. We'll see, maybe something later. But right now I'm just kind of blown away. This guy is mixing Science Fiction space battles and real life, cutting-edge military weapons. If I heard him right, there is a chat group somewhere devoted to figuring out just what the next generation of weapons might be capable of. Such a discussion might be pointless, but then talking politics is equally pointless, but we still do it. And every once in a while a thought from one of these discussions might weasel its way out of the chat group, slither along the streets and avenues of society and into the ear of someone who can do something about it. I mean it has happened, hasn't it? Unfortunately, the one incident that pops into my head is one where the warning was not heeded. It was the idea of using an airliner to attack New York City. I read a story about that probably thirty years before it actually happened. 

Now that I think about it, I realize the guys in charge of airline security were probably thinking about it, but we never heard from them. All I heard about the airliners crashing into the Twin Towers was the idiotic "who'd-a-thunk-it?" Anybody who had a brain would-a-thunk it. But realizing you have a potential problem is only the first step. Next you need a solution. That's easy, you just dream up your perfect security apparatus. But now you have to sell it, and all the players have to agree on your solution. I'll bet that's what happened, nobody liked the idea of a perfect security apparatus so we did nothing. We worked on the honor system, and it worked for, what? 50 years?

I do wonder just what kind of airline security we should be using. Seems there ought to be a better way. Our current method of having a legion of TSA agents inspecting individual passengers is cumbersome and of dubious efficacy. One one hand it's annoying and time consuming, and number of actual terrorists they've stopped is near zero*. On the other hand, no airliners have been commandeered by terrorists lately.

* I have no idea how many terrorists the TSA has arrested. Of course, you can always fudge the numbers. If you were asking how many terrorists, to the nearest thousand, then anything less than 500 would round to zero. And that was the question you were asking, right? So I feel pretty safe about saying zero.

Back on the video. I really enjoy watching those test flights of maneuvering rockets. I'm gonna have to watch this again.