--jks ********** [Care to comment on the public good nature of the evil described below. Too bad the soldier of tomorrow won't be too highly trained in questioning the prerogatives of his/her employers.]
Mini-generator that gives green light to the Robocop warrior of tomorrow
Invention paves way to making laser-wielding hi-tech soldiers a reality
Tim Radford, science editor Monday April 23, 2001 The Guardian
The soldiers of the future - able to see in the dark, around corners and over the horizon - will look like Robocop and stalk their target like the Terminator. Computer displays on their visor-screens will keep them in touch with comrades and give warning of where landmines lie. They will have miniature camera-carrying spyplanes in their backpacks, which they will be able to steer over barricades, under bridges or through windows.
And when they say the word, tiny rocket launchers mounted on their wrists will fire projectiles which will lock on to a target visible only on their eye-level screens.
Personal body armour will automatically sense the landscape and change colour accordingly to camouflage the soldier. It will react to temperature and adjust the climate inside to keep the soldier cool or warm. It will be wired with tiny sensors to detect chemical and biological attack, and swiftly seal them from the ambient air.
If they get hit by a high calibre bullet, it will tell the medical teams how much blood they are losing. Even in the dark or the smoke of battle, the medics will find them, because they will be on their screens too - linked to a global positioning system that can pinpoint them to a metre or two.
For five years, that has been the dream. But there has been a catch: it would take a 20lb battery to power tomorrow's hi-tech infantry soldier for even a few days in the field. A US team of engineers may be about to change that.
Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state have just unveiled a space age generator that weighs less than 2lb, measures little more than a fat paperback novel, can generate 25 watts and keep going for a week.
Fuel cells powered by hydrogen are the power packs of tomorrow. Although invented by a Victorian barrister called William Grove, they were first used to get Apollo astronauts to the moon. Smaller scale fuel cells are already on trial in buses in Chicago.
The latest design from the Washington labs will contain a store for aviation spirit or diesel to make the hydrogen, a cell in which the hydrogen reacts with oxygen to yield energy, and a little lithium battery, all in tubes about eight inches long. The complete system could be ready for testing by 2003.
"By then we expect infantry soldiers to use a variety of electronic gear, such as heads-up displays, global positioning systems, laser range finders and thermal weapons sights," said James Stephens, who led the research. "It all takes power, but we can't ask these soldiers to carry any more weight."
But the future warrior will go into battle so highly trained, so technologically equipped, that they will be too costly to be regarded as mere cannon-fodder. So microsensors in their underwear will measure their heart rate and stress levels, and incorporate the kind of climate controls used in astronauts' space suits. A drinking straw inside their helmet will supply water.
A patch on their arm will feed nutrients and vitamins through the skin and into their bloodstream to keep them going in the combat zone.
The visor will incorporate a night-vision light intensifier to turn night into day.
The helmet will be fitted with target and communications computer systems linked by wireless to their field command - to save the soldier from "friendly" fire - and it will say when to dive for cover when the beam of a sniper's laser sight touches them.
It will contain tiny microphones to give them sounds from every direction. It may even have a tiny video camera to relay what they see back to the battle commanders.
And if the visionaries at the US Army Soldier Systems Centre in Natick, Massachusetts, have got it right, their own weaponry will be mounted Batman-style in a pod on their wrist.
This will house bullets with a range of 300 yards and six inch exploding projectiles with a range of 1,000 yards, all fired by voice command. It may even hold a thermal imager that could detect concealed mines in the user's path. Some of this hardware is ready now. Some is in the workshops. Some still waits for the defence laboratories to deliver the ultra-light "wear able" computer systems of 2025. The US army is already testing a palmtop based military system called Jedi - short for joint expeditionary digital information system - and the UK Ministry of Defence is pumping millions into nanotechnology to devise sensors and "smart" armour on a scale of a billionth of a metre.
By 2003, the Americans will have spent $2bn on Land Warrior, which will provide soldiers with their own digitised map display on a monitor fitted to the helmet, and a laser rangefinder that can calculate the distance to the target and display the spot on the map.
It will weigh more than 80lb and cost a fortune to replace - which is why scientists are also working hard on tiny, expendable robots, programmed to go into the field of fire ahead of tomorrow's warrior.
Things to come
Other new hi-tech inventions in the pipeline include:
. Nasa is soon to test a "scramjet" aircraft (above) that could in theory fly at up to 7,000 miles an hour and cross the Atlantic in 30 minutes, scooping up oxygen from the air and combining it with hydrogen for propulsion.
. Sandia National Laboratories in Albequerque has developed a magnetic accelerator that can fire projectiles up to 20 times the speed of a rifle bullet. It is at the moment being used for lab tests - but a weapon based on it would destroy targets purely by kinetic energy.
. The US Marine Corps and the Naval Research Lab are soon to award contracts for a miniature plane called Dragon Eye that runs on a battery, carries a camera in its nose, can fly at 500ft, stay in the air for an hour, and can be carried in a soldier's backpack.
. Naval scientists are experimenting with "supercavitation" bubbles to reduce hydrodynamic drag. The Russians already have a supercavitation torpedo that travels underwater at 230 mph. The next step: long-range underwater missiles.