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Flechette Rifle
A needlegun, also known as a needler, flechette gun or fletcher, is a firearm that fires small, sometimes fin-stabilized, metal darts or flechettes. Theoretically, the advantages of a needlegun over conventional projectile firearms are in its compact size, high rate of fire, and extreme muzzle velocity. The needle presents less frontal area than a bullet, producing less drag and thus more effective range (especially in water) than a wider projectile of the same mass and velocity. There have been experiments to make guided flechettes that can home in on targets. Pre-industrial The first projectiles in early gun systems dating from the 14th century were typically hand wrought iron flechettes wrapped in a leather sabot. However, due to the expense and trouble of making these darts in a pre-industrial society, they were soon replaced with the less accurate stone cannonball. World War I Flechettes again came into mass use in the years before World War I. Starting as early as 1910, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
APS Underwater Rifle REMOV
APS or Aps or aps or similar may refer to: Education * Abbottabad Public School * Adarsh Public School, a public school in New Delhi, India * Alamogordo Public Schools * Albuquerque Public Schools, New Mexico, US school district * Allendale Public Schools * Indian Army Public Schools * Associated Public Schools of Victoria, independent school group, Australia * Atlanta Public Schools * Abbotsford Public School, in Abbotsford, New South Wales Places * Anápolis, Goiás, Brazil, IATA airport code * Apsley railway station, Apsley, England, National Rail code * Alba-la-Romaine, Ardèche, France, known as ''Aps'' until 1904 Science and medicine * Adenosine 5'-phosphosulfate, a metabolic precursor to 3'-phosphoadenosine-5'-phosphosulfate (PAPS) * Advanced Photon Source, a synchrotron X-ray source at Argonne National Laboratory * Algebra of physical space * American Physical Society * American Physiological Society * American Phytopathological Society * Ammonium persulfate, oxidizing ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War (also known by #Names, other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. The north was supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist states, while the south was United States in the Vietnam War, supported by the United States and other anti-communism, anti-communist Free World Military Forces, allies. The war is widely considered to be a Cold War-era proxy war. It lasted almost 20 years, with direct U.S. involvement ending in 1973. The conflict also spilled over into neighboring states, exacerbating the Laotian Civil War and the Cambodian Civil War, which ended with all three countries becoming communist states by 1975. After the French 1954 Geneva Conference, military withdrawal from Indochina in 1954 – following their defeat in the First Indochina War – the Viet Minh to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Snow Crash
''Snow Crash'' is a science fiction novel by the American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson's novels, it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics, and philosophy. In his 1999 essay " In the Beginning... Was the Command Line", Stephenson explained the title of the novel as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Macintosh computer. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh that "When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a 'snow crash. Stephenson has also mentioned that Julian Jaynes' book ''The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind'' was one of the main influences on ''Snow Crash''. Stephenson originally planned ''Snow Crash'' as a computer-generated graphic novel in collaboration with artist Tony Sheeder. In the author's ackn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neal Stephenson
Neal Town Stephenson (born October 31, 1959) is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction. His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, and baroque. Stephenson's work explores mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. He also writes non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as ''Wired''. He has written novels with his uncle, George Jewsbury ("J. Frederick George"), under the collective pseudonym Stephen Bury. Stephenson has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (founded by Jeff Bezos) developing a spacecraft and a space launch system, and is also a cofounder of Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project ''The Mongoliad''. He was Magic Leap's Chief Futurist from 2014 to 2020. Early life Born on October 31, 1959, in Fort Meade, Maryland, Stephenson came from a family of engineers and scient ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Molly Millions
Molly Millions (also known as Sally Shears, Rose Kolodny, and others) is a recurring character in stories and novels written by William Gibson, particularly his Sprawl trilogy. She first appeared in "Johnny Mnemonic", to which she makes an oblique reference in ''Neuromancer'' (where she is mostly referred to as "Molly" with no last name given). She later appeared in ''Mona Lisa Overdrive'' under the name "Sally Shears". Character history In all three stories, Molly is a physically tough (but not instantly imposing) bodyguard/mercenary cyborg. She is referred to as a "razorgirl" or "street samurai" throughout his stories and also as "Steppin' Razor" by the residents of Zion, a Rastafarian enclave aboard a space station. A useful contact for dealing with gangs and black market elements, she tends to show little remorse for the opponents she ruthlessly dispatches in the course of her objectives. In fact she shows few deep emotions towards anyone outside of hatred, suspicion or amused ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neuromancer
''Neuromancer'' is a 1984 science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer William Gibson. Considered one of the earliest and best-known works in the cyberpunk genre, it is the only novel to win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was Gibson's debut novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy. Set in the future, the novel follows Henry Case, a washed-up hacker hired for one last job, which brings him in contact with a powerful artificial intelligence. Background Before ''Neuromancer'', Gibson had written several short stories for US science fiction periodicals—mostly noir countercultural narratives concerning low-life protagonists in near-future encounters with cyberspace. The themes he developed in this early short fiction, the Sprawl setting of "Burning Chrome" (1982), and the character of Molly Millions from "Johnny Mnemonic" (1981) laid the foundations for the novel. John Carpenter's ''Escape from New York'' (1981) influenced the novel; Gi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Gibson
William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as ''cyberpunk''. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson coined the term " cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982), and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel ''Neuromancer'' (1984). These early works of Gibson's have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature in the 1980s. After expanding on the story in ''Neuromancer'' with two more novels (''Count Zero'' in 1986, and ''Mona Lisa Overdrive'' in 1988), th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marko Kloos
Marko Kloos is a German author of military science fiction and high fantasy. Born in Germany, Kloos lives and works in the United States. Work Kloos is best known for his ''Frontlines'' series of military science fiction novels. Featuring the protagonist Andrew Grayson, they are set in a future in which a Western and an Eastern power bloc are at war with each other and with an alien threat. Reviewing the first novel, ''Terms of Enlistment'', ''io9'' described it as sticking close to the conventions of the genre, focusing on "guns, acronyms, hard-ass drill sergeants, explosions and battles on alien worlds". The reviewer considered the second novel, ''Lines of Departure'', to be an improvement in that it reflected a critical outlook towards powerful, centralized government that was often absent in leading works of the genre such as Robert Heinlein's ''Starship Troopers''. ''Lines of Departure'' was nominated for the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel on a slate organized by the "Sad ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Advanced Combat Rifle
The Advanced Combat Rifle (ACR) was a United States Army program, started in 1986, to find a replacement for the M16 assault rifle. Under the stress of battle the average soldier with an M16 may shoot a target at 45 meters, but hit probability is reduced to one out of ten shots on target by 220 meters. Because of this, the ACR program was initiated in the late 1980s to create a weapon that could double the hit probability. The ACR program was preceded by older programs such as the Special Purpose Individual Weapon. The program ended in 1990 after an expenditure of approximately US$300 million. Phase I and II Phase I of the program started in February 1986 when development contracts were placed with six companies: AAI Corporation, Ares Incorporated, Colt's Manufacturing Company, Heckler & Koch (H&K), McDonnell Douglas Helicopter Systems (MDHS), and Steyr Mannlicher. Two weapons were cut from the list before Phase II started. The companies started an appeals process and were ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States Army
The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, clause 1 of the United States Constitution (1789). See alsTitle 10, Subtitle B, Chapter 301, Section 3001 The oldest and most senior branch of the U.S. military in order of precedence, the modern U.S. Army has its roots in the Continental Army, which was formed 14 June 1775 to fight the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783)—before the United States was established as a country. After the Revolutionary War, the Congress of the Confederation created the United States Army on 3 June 1784 to replace the disbanded Continental Army.Library of CongressJournals of the Continental Congress, Volume 27/ref> The United States Army considers itself to be a continuation of the Continental Army, and thus considers its institutional inception to be th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Special Purpose Individual Weapon
The Special Purpose Individual Weapon (SPIW) was a long-running United States Army program to develop, in part, a workable flechette-firing "rifle", though other concepts were also involved. The concepts continued to be tested under the Future Rifle Program and again in the 1980s under the Advanced Combat Rifle program, but neither program resulted in a system useful enough to warrant replacing the M16. Project SALVO The idea of a flechette-firing individual weapon started in earnest during the Army's Project SALVO. SALVO had earlier concluded that a small weapon with a high rate of fire would be considerably deadlier than the large "full power" weapons being developed in the 1950s, and followed several lines of investigation to find the best way to provide high firing rates. SALVO had a small number of "duplex load" weapons developed, where two bullets were stacked, while Springfield Armory and Olin/Winchester both entered multiple barrel firearms. Even before the SALVO tests, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SPIW At The National Firearms Museum
The Special Purpose Individual Weapon (SPIW) was a long-running United States Army program to develop, in part, a workable flechette-firing "rifle", though other concepts were also involved. The concepts continued to be tested under the Future Rifle Program and again in the 1980s under the Advanced Combat Rifle program, but neither program resulted in a system useful enough to warrant replacing the M16. Project SALVO The idea of a flechette-firing individual weapon started in earnest during the Army's Project SALVO. SALVO had earlier concluded that a small weapon with a high rate of fire would be considerably deadlier than the large "full power" weapons being developed in the 1950s, and followed several lines of investigation to find the best way to provide high firing rates. SALVO had a small number of "duplex load" weapons developed, where two bullets were stacked, while Springfield Armory and Olin/Winchester both entered multiple barrel firearms. Even before the SALVO tests, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
