h a l f b a k e r yPoint of hors d'oevre
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Halo tanker
deck out water tankers with large vertical & horizontal sprayers | |
The Halo unit is a bolt on addition to any water tanker or water carrying road train to make these vehicles fire suppressing tanks.
The device has piping mechanisms to draw, pressurize the water and and spray the water in protective bubble around the tanker. I'm imagining a series of circular pipe
frames periodic fitted with nozzles spraying water in all directions creating a cacooning wet environment. The more presure the greater the sancutuary but the shorter it will last. Fuel for the pump can be drawn out of tanker's fuel tank through a specialised fuel cap.
These tankers can run rescue lines and set up protective zones in support of actual appliances. If the tankers are 4WD, a convoy could make inroads into drivable sections of a forest fire and set up stragetic positions for crews to carry out their valiant work.
The only problem is, like it always is, sources of water.
EATR (robot)
https://en.m.wikipe...mous_Tactical_Robot
Wikipedia page [sninctown, Dec 30 2019]
Spiderbot (old videogame for Commodore 64)
https://youtu.be/XZSObFVfI5E
Youtube link. Kind of intense [sninctown, Dec 30 2019]
Forest fire power generation
Forest_20fire_20power_20generation
Prior Art, [sninc] ... [8th of 7, Dec 30 2019]
Crablogger
https://thunderbird...com/wiki/Crablogger
More Prior Art ... [8th of 7, Dec 30 2019]
M-69
https://en.wikipedi...wiki/M69_incendiary
We love the smell of napalm ... well, pretty much any time of the day or night, actually. [8th of 7, Dec 30 2019]
Pulaski
https://en.wikipedi...wiki/Pulaski_(tool)
Every home should have one. [8th of 7, Dec 31 2019]
Fu-Go
https://en.wikipedi.../Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
Launch balloons and start fires with them. [8th of 7, Dec 31 2019]
The Hexapod.
https://www.youtube...watch?v=46Uod3QHsuM
[2 fries shy of a happy meal, Dec 31 2019]
Hitchhiker's Guide on voting
https://www.goodrea...mocracy-you-see-you
"...because the wrong lizard might get in." [sninctown, Jan 03 2020]
Hitchhiker's Guide on presidents
https://www.goodrea...y-much-a-figurehead
"...job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it." [sninctown, Jan 03 2020]
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A firefighter I know mentioned that fighting a large
fire can rapidly consume as much water as is
available. A water truck is better than nothing, but a
lake is preferred. Also, a fire may consume enough
oxygen to choke and stall out a firetruck engine
attempting to drive through the blaze. |
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True the battles have to be picked that can be won. Maybe Batteries or electrolysis? |
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I'd propose a wood-fired fire truck. Actually, less of a truck and more
of a Spiderbot. Specifically, the "EATR" robot (fueled by internal
combustion of biomass) on an articulated-leg chassis (like a spider)
with a wood chipper maw at one end. For creation of fire breaks,
current practice is a team of people to fell trees and rake the ground,
which is often insufficient to stop the fire. What I propose resembles a
giant mechanical Shelob, which when unleashed would clear a wide
path in its dread progress, articulated mandibles uprooting trees and
feeding all organic matter into its terrible jaws, as its abdomen churns
with internal energies and glows with the red heat of combustion,
leaving in its wake a 40 foot wide swath of churned earth and bare
rock. |
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We did consider having the unit towed by a wood-fired steam traction engine, but given its vast size a conventional turbo-electric drive is much more practical. |
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Unlike the EATR mentioned, our design is specifically intended to pre-empt forest fires, not just to scavenge. |
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Shirley the whole forest fire problem can be solved by having
more of them, more often. Just get aircraft to drop
incendiaries every couple of square miles every few years,
burning out any small patches of forest that are overdue for a
fire. As with food and murder, "little and often" is best. |
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Yes, that's what the USFS do. Cute little incendiary pellets, ping-pong balls filled with a mix of isopropanol and potassium permanganate, self-igniting, cheap, nonpolluting, and very effective at igniting underbrush. |
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Not nearly as much fun as a vic of B-52's loaded up to max with M-69's, tho ... |
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//a mix of isopropanol and potassium permanganate, self-
igniting// |
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Whoa there. Surely that mixture would self-ignite as soon as
it was made? |
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There's a diaphragm; the mechanism that ejects them from the aircraft has a pin that punctures it just as it exits the chute. The pellet lands and almost immediately ignites. |
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Acceptably unsafe for a civilian application; no detonants, no white phosphorus or alkali metals, no primary explosives. |
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//a pin that punctures it just as it exits the chute// Ah.
That explains it. For a moment there I thought you'd come up
with something clever. |
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The level of innovation in the Forest Service is commensurate with the challenges they face, and rarely goes beyond items more sophisticated than, for example, the Pulaski <link> - which is, however, magnificently "fit for purpose". |
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The air dropped incendiary pellets probably originated with NASA, although the Japanese made a significant contribution to the concept in the 1940's <link>. |
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// Shirley the whole forest fire problem can be solved by having more of them, more often. // |
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That is a very good point.
I am old enough to remember when we used to do controlled burns at times of the year when the trees could be kept from igniting while destroying the underbrush.
In fire season the dead limbs and needles can be several feet thick in places and may as well be comprised of matchsticks for how fast it can all go up. Between that and fire-breaks wild fires were far more manageable. |
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First the tourists began complaining about hazy air quality.
Then the Eco activists determined that several feet of matchsticks piled under bone-dry forests are a good thing...
...and now we just can't seem to put the dang things out the way we used to. |
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//First the tourists began complaining about hazy air
quality.
Then the Eco activists determined that several feet of
matchsticks piled under bone-dry forests are a good
thing...// |
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Crucially, not doing things is cheaper than doing things. If
you can not do things and explain how you're a good
environmentalist at the same time you're on to a political
winner. Under the surface, there have been grumblings
about forestry mismanagement in California, but all local
responsibility has now been absolved in favor of the
universal boogy man of global warming. |
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Logically, the steps should be: |
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1. Move all human activity away from forested regions. |
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2. Leave the forests completely alone and let nature determine when, where and how much they burn. |
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// 1. Move all human activity away from forested regions.
2. Leave the forests completely alone and let nature determine when, where and how much they burn.
What's wrong with that ?// |
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1. We refuse to stabilize our numbers.
2. See # 1. |
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Nature, if left alone, would have roving packs of wolves and solitary predators which reshape their own ecological niches by controlling prey activity, rampant beaver construction damming and creating maximized wetland areas, and roaming herds of herbivores as far as the eye can see keeping the grasslands from desertification. |
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Way fewer devastating wild fires by working with nature rather than logging, burning, and paving it...
...but I wasn't alive to be consulted then, and now that I am... well, it's like really hard to be heard whilst screaming into seven billion lungs worth of wind-storm. |
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// We refuse to stabilize our numbers // |
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We suggest some sort of cull - discriminating, or indeed indiscriminate - is clearly indicated. |
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There are a number of possible mechanisms. |
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Or...
...or we work on a gradual de-populization while sporing into space using all of the tech which the general public has been purposely kept at least fifty years behind the times of... |
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Some will need to stay behind to help clean up the damage of course. A cooperative stable five billion or so should do nicely. |
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// A cooperative stable five billion or so should do nicely. // |
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Indeed. Perhaps if they were organised into a single efficient Collective consciousness by some sort of process of absorbtion, that would be even better. |
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The sooner you start, the better. |
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Seeds planted take time and nurturing.
Just waiting to reap what's already been sown. Forging a plowshare from a sword was the hard part. |
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// tech which the general public has been purposely kept at least fifty
years behind the times of // |
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Interesting theory. It'd pain me to learn that my engineering work had
been made ineffective on purpose by suppressing useful technology. |
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Strangely enough, I have been unable to find any suppressed
technology on the usual archive sites. I have however found doctored
photographs, a lot of descriptions of half-baked prototypes that don't
work, and eager statements by people who are also on record saying
verifiably wrong things. It's odd that I have not found a single
suppressed technology. Sure, there are expensive-to-build
technologies, and there seem to be trade-secret technogies, but these
are differences of degree not of kind. |
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One big one here would be an inertial-suppression device. The leading
suppressed-tech theory seems to be that strong electromagnetic
fields negate mass, so making a superconducting metal sphere and
setting up standing waves (both electrical and mechanical) in it
makes it and the surroundings have less mass. I see no actual
evidence to support this though. |
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Another big one would be AI. However I don't see chip manufacturers
suppressing technology, instead the goal is to keep up with Moore's
Law. The sense I get is that whoever owns it all would love to deploy
AI to outnumber humans, but the tech isn't ready yet. |
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Another big one would be magic/psi/esp or something like that. Here
again it sounds like there's nothing definitive although many
subjective experiences seem real to the guy having the visions. |
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As much as I'd love there to |
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