Introduce New US Navy ship : USS New York (LPD-21) (part 1)

    

      USS New York (LPD-21), the fifth San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock, is the sixth ship of the United States Navy to be named after the state of New York. The New York has a crew of 360, and can also carry up to 700 Marines. The ship is notable for using steel that was salvaged from the World Trade Center, after it was destroyed in the September 11 attacks.

      The ship is the first to be designed fully from the CAD-screen up to support all three of the Marines' primary mobility capabilities — the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV), Landing Craft Air Cushion and MV-22B Osprey.

      Shortly after 11 September 2001, Governor of New York George E. Pataki wrote a letter to Secretary of the Navy Gordon R. England requesting that the Navy bestow the name USS New York on a surface warship involved in the War on Terrorism in honor of September 11's victims.

       The contract to build the New York was awarded to Northrop Grumman Ship Systems of New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2003. The New York was under construction in New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina in 2005

World Trade Center steel

      7.5 short tons (6.8 t) of the steel used in the ship's construction came from the rubble of the World Trade Center; this represents less than one thousandth of the total weight of the ship. The steel was melted down at Amite Foundry and Machine in Amite, Louisiana, to cast the ship's bow section. It was poured into the molds on 9 September 2003, with 7 short tons (6.4 t) cast to form the ship's "stem bar" — part of the ship's bow.  The shipyard workers reportedly treated it with "reverence usually accorded to religious relics", gently touching it as they walked by. One worker delayed his retirement after 40 years' work to be part of the project.

 

Aircraft

      At the stern of the ship the landing deck is able to accommodate two Sikorsky CH-53E Sea Stallion helicopters, six Bell AH-1W Super Cobra helicopters, four Boeing CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters or two Boeing Bell MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft.

      The hangar deck provides aviation maintenance facilities and is sufficiently large to accommodate one Sea Stallion, two Sea Knight, three Super Cobra helicopters or one MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft. The hangar doors are constructed by Indal Technologies. Each blast-resistant door weighs 18,000kg and has three horizontal folding panels.

       USS San Antonio began flight operations testing with the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor and CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter in June 2006.

DIMENSIONAL PORTAL INCURSION AT THE LHC ( Part 2)

Blue glowing ball 'must be a response' from the FIFTH DIMENSION

      According to our contact, approximately 3 and a half minutes after the tiny and incredibly brief supersymmetry event in the ATLAS instrument, a much larger and apparently stable transdimensional "door" flowered into existence within the ATLAS cavern, suspended mid-air slightly to one side of the Collider's magnets and the ATLAS itself. The portal, described initially as a "glowing, bluish, spherical object about 2 metres in diameter", was spotted on CCTV by ATLAS boffins - no personnel are allowed in the cavern during beam operations for radiation safety reasons.

      "There's no way that the LHC could have generated such a large 'door', or sustained it so long," our source wrote in a hasty email early this morning.

      "There's no technology we know of that could do that, and even if there was the entire human race doesn't have access to enough energy to power it."

      "We think it must be a response to the supersymmetric energy discharge from our side," he added, enigmatically.

     
      We followed up with more questions, but haven't received any further response as of publication. Enquiries through official channels elicited a boilerplate denial, but that means nothing - CERN spokesmen have attempted to hush up major incidents at the LHC before.

      Events at the LHC since the early hours of this morning remain unclear. However it appears that the Swiss government may have called in outside help. Online enthusiasts reported sightings of unidentified soldiers in combat equipment on various CERN webcams, before all imagery was abruptly replaced with stock footage showing routine scenes - in many cases with telltale evidence such as apparently months-old newspapers or magazines, or clocks and watches showing times at variance with reality.

      Meanwhile unconfirmed reports have it that various elite special-forces units belonging to the member nations of CERN have been despatched to Geneva. Elements of the British SAS are thought to have arrived at CERN headquarters just hours ago, joining French GIGN and German GSG9 operatives at the scene. It is thought that members of the elite Swiss police "Stern" tactical unit descended into the underground complex housing the ATLAS experiment early this morning, and have not returned.

       One anonymous Reg informant - in a message originating from an IP address registered to CERN at Geneva - has reported explosions, gunfire and screams coming from the access shafts leading down to the ATLAS cavern 70 metres below ground level. Others have described heavy helicopter traffic at the complex, the arrival of several unmarked military transport planes at the adjacent Geneva airport in the early hours of this morning, and in one case "a blue vertical beam like a searchlight" intermittently shining up from the ATLAS facility before cutting out.

       British Ministry of Defence spokesmen this morning couldn't deny that UK elite troops are in Switzerland fighting as part of an international taskforce to resist a hyperdimensional invasion. However they refused to give any details.

      "It is MoD policy that we never comment on Special Forces operations," said a spokesperson.

     More reports are coming in on this story: we may or may not be able to publish them.

thank you.

from the register

DIMENSIONAL PORTAL INCURSION AT THE LHC ( Part 1)

Elite troops confront 'response' to 7 TeV collisions

      April Fools In shock news, it has emerged that recent record-breaking increases in particle ring energy achieved at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - the most powerful atomsmasher ever assembled by the human race - have caused a hyperdimensional portal leading to an inhabited parallel universe to open up deep beneath Switzerland, in what may be the opening move of a cross-continuum invasion campaign.

      A secret international task force of special-forces troops is said to be assembling at the Collider to deal with a 'response' from the fifth dimension to a hyperdimensional energy discharge emitted from the LHC.

 

      The opening of the dimensional gateway is being kept subject to a governmental news blackout to avoid a global panic. However, keen amateur LHC-watching enthusiasts, familiar with the many internal websites used to run and monitor the mighty Collider, stumbled across imagery last night confirming that a "supersymmetric" event had taken place following a particle collision inside the huge, subterranean ATLAS instrument cavern.

      Supersymmetry, in layman's terms, is a phenomenon called for by a theory in physics which states that there are actually ten dimensions rather than the humdrum four of the space-time we can normally perceive. This has now been proven to be correct.

      According to the data accompanying the picture, one of the unprecedentedly powerful 7 tera-electron-volt (TeV) collisions which began at the LHC just two days ago generated a pair of supersymmetric particles which then broke down via muon decay. This caused a small 283 giga-electron-volt energy discharge to be emitted transversely out of our four-dimensional spacetime and into the fifth dimension.

      So much had long been expected by physicists. Sergio Bertolucci, Director for Research and Scientific Computing at CERN, told the Reg last year that he anticipated the opening of hyperdimensional "doors" during high-energy LHC collisions.

      "Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it," said the physicist, on that occasion.

      Bertolucci expected that such doors would be sub-subatomic in size, and only exist for ultra-tiny instants of time - 10^-26 seconds - in line with the data passed to us by the LHC-watchers.

       Excited by the supersymmetry tipoff, we here on the Reg hyperboffinry desk contacted a high-level insider source at CERN in Switzerland regarding the event - and found we didn't know the half of it.

US Marines team on proper flying car project

     Big news for flying-car lovers today, as US military boffinry chiefs have unveiled full details of their plan to produce an excellent flying Humvee or sky-jeep type vehicle - and have a prototype flying by 2015. The Register said

      Plans for the so-called "Transformer TX" were revealed in Pentagon budget documents last year, but details were sketchy. Now a full announcement (pdf) has been made, inviting proposals both from companies or organisations capable of designing the entire vehicle and others who would develop enabling technologies.

      One need hardly add, of course, that the military boffinry shop in question is none other than DARPA: the agency which, just occasionally, produces the technological equivalent of the complete works of Shakespeare - but which also cranks out a hell of a lot of monkey sonnets.

      In this case, the federal techno bad boys of DARPA have decided to have a crack at a real, no-shit flying car: and probably not just an ordinary car, but an off-road one to boot. They don't want a light plane that you can drive on a road, like the Terrafugia Transition. They don't want a paramotor, either. According to the Transformer TX announcement issued yesterday:

The Government’s envisioned concept consists of a robust ground vehicle that is capable of configuring into a VTOL [Vertical Take Off and Landing] air vehicle with a maximum payload capability of approximately 1,000 lbs.

      The sky-jeep should be able to carry four fully-equipped troops, or alternatively one stretcher and one medic. It should be no bigger than 30 feet long by 8.5' wide and 9' high in ground configuration - on the order of two Hummers nose-to-tail - and should have wheels and suspension giving "road performance similar to an SUV" and "capable of handling light off-road travel".

      In addition to being a capable ground vehicle, the TX should be able to lift off and land "without forward motion" and thereafter climb at least one unit upward for every six moved forward at sea level, or a minimum of 1:10 at higher altitudes. It should cruise in forward flight mode at speeds "representative of a light single-engine aircraft" and be able to achieve altitudes of 10,000 feet.

from The Register

Mobile Nuclear Reactors for Military

   Making U.S. Navy carrier groups and Army bases more self-sufficient and energy-efficient could mean turning to mobile nuclear reactors. The Pentagon's DARPA scientists have put forth the modest proposal of deploying miniature reactors to convert hydrogen and carbon into military jet fuel, as well as providing power.
   That plan could fit well with the U.S. Navy's "Green Strike Group" concept for biofuel and nuclear-powered vessels. The Register points out that nuclear-powered aircraft carriers could make use of seawater to make JP-8 jet fuel from carbon dioxide and hydrogen, courtesy of work by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
   This gets trickier for U.S. military land bases that lack easy access to carbon feedstocks or massive quantities of water, but DARPA does hint at making use of the sewage lakes that have accumulated next to some bases in Afghanistan. Still, trucking in huge amounts of water could prove unwieldy.
   The U.S. military has already begun deploying green technologies that aim for self-sufficiency for reasons beyond environmental concerns -- running fuel convoys puts U.S. warfighters in harm's way of insurgent ambushes and roadside bombs.

   DARPA ultimately hopes for portable nuclear reactors that can provide 5 to 10 megawatts of electricity and produce 15,000 gallons of JP-8 or road fuel every day -- about enough fuel to top off a Chinook helicopter a dozen times, according to The Register.
   Perhaps the biggest technical challenge is creating such small nuclear reactors in the first place. But at least Microsoft founder Bill Gates and others have already begun backing plans for shrinking nuclear power to portable sizes.