camelsho@matt.ksu.ksu.edu (James Seymour) (05/23/91)
From: camelsho@matt.ksu.ksu.edu (James Seymour) COMPOSITE BOWS: Scientific American (june 1991) has a nice article on composite bows. If this is your area of interest, you should really get a copy and take a look. Anybody know of any other such articles? (composite bows talked about are of wood, horn, sinew, and glue) This is just a brief overview of the bow itself, not a treatise on its use. Could somebody please email me a good title of any book on ancient mobility warfare? I already have a "copy" of Vic Hurley's ARROWS AGAINST STEEL: THE HISTORY OF THE BOW. This is a good book, but then I'm not a good judge of its validity. I might add that I am looking for a real copy of the book---mine is photocopied as I could not find it anywhere. MERKIVA (sorry if this is spelled wrong) I think its been discussed here before as a sideline, but I'll ask again. [sorry moderator] Could somebody please give an analysis of the Merkiva vs the various M1's? Also, how does it stack up against other main battle tanks? What are its relative strengths and weaknesses? How does its overall target aquistion rate? What about the maintainablity? (Yeah, I know, the Merkiva is for a specific envron, but as this year has shown, you never can tell just where what will show up to meet you.) POWER ARMOR <=== IS IT FEASABLE IN THE NEAR FUTURE? A friend owns the local game store which I was in today, err yesterday. We started by talking about the composite bows, switched to crossbows, moved on to the Merkiva question, and ended up on Power Armor (PA hereafter). It was Royal's contention that we are near the tech level needed for PA. When queried, he ran off a whole list of stuff: 5 lbs personal airconditioners (7 lbs if you want filtration), layered Kevlar armors, reactive armors, heads up displays, integrated circuits, modular systems, power augmentation for hadicapped that run on neural inputs that funcion much like orginal limbs, hand/shoulder held/fired antitank weapons, etc. [Who's going to do the maintenaince on all that? --CDR] Royal even postulized that it might be possible to field 20 or more PA equiped troops for the cost of normal armored vehicles. After all, could 1 tank stand up to 20 incoming missiles after he managed to kill the rest of the PA crew? This was an intreging point. If we really wanted to, could we actually produce effective PA? If not, what advances still have to be made and what is the estimated time frame for developement of the respecive technologies to arrive? What real use would PA have in combat? Would they be a cost effective alternative to convential weapons? Hey, is someone already working on PA? What is the progress so far? [Keep any speculation technical and near-term, please. --CDR] thanks, james seymour camelsho@matt.ksu.ksu.edu